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^6 







AN 

OLD CASTLE 

AND OTHER ESSAYS 

BY 

C. T. WINCHESTER 

LATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN 
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 




THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



1922 

All rights reserved 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 






T^, 



Copyright, 1922, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and printed. Published November, 1922. 



Press of 

J. J. Little & Ives Company 
New York, U. S. A. 



NOV 15 



'22 



*V10 I 



MEN LIVE AFTER THEIR DEATH, — THEY LIVE NOT 
ONLY IN THEIR WRITINGS OR THEIR CHRONICLED 
HISTORY, BUT STILL MORE IN THAT a7pa0OS jUVTyjUTJ 
EXHIBITED IN A SCHOOL OF PUPILS WHO TRACE 
THEIR MORAL PARENTAGE TO THEM 

NEWMAN 



PREFACE 

Seldom is it the teacher's lot to have any of his work 
perpetuated in lasting literary form. But Professor Win- 
chester's students will remember how the work in the class- 
room led up to finished summary lectures. They developed 
out of the rich autumn mould of his acquisitions, year after 
year,^ and showed us best of all how thorough and thought- 
ful study had enabled him to "see into the life of things." 
In these talks to students lay the origins of the public lec- 
tures which charmed and enlightened a far more widely 
ranging audience. Even the latter, Professor Winchester 
rarely published. Therefore certain typical examples, rep- 
resentative both of his power as a teacher and his appeal 
as a lecturer, it has now seemed best to give to the world. 
"Art," once wrote their author, "is the only way the indi- 
vidual has of perpetuating his personality." In this way 
these papers are not alone of intrinsic value but fitly 
memorial. 

Professor Winchester admirably illustrated his own ideal 
of a critic,^ — one who could "quicken your feeling for what 
is essential and characteristic in an author's work." Hun- 
dreds can testify to the success with which he did this in 
the lecture-room or through the printed page. The range 
of these essays indicates in some measure the catholicity of 
his taste and the scope of his powers of literary apprecia- 
tion. He was always, I think, especially interested in the 
man behind the book. Interest in character and in the work 
as an index to character was what led him into a method of 
criticism pronouncedly biographical. It was because he 

* The actual writing of them out Professor Winchester often did very 
quickly; he told the editor that the Shakespeare lecture he thought his best, 
the Antony and Cleopatra, was dashed off at one sitting of a single after- 



vlii PREFACE 

brought so broad and deep and wise an experience of life 
to his reading that he found so much there. Literature in 
turn increased his own understanding of human nature, and 
he made it the means of conveying that knowledge to others. 
Vivid and dear memories flash into the minds of many of 
us as we read these pages. We see that dignified figure 
come quietly into the crowded lecture-hall to make Shake- 
speare or Wordsworth or Burns live for us as never before. 
Upon all of us in some way this man made an indelible im- 
pression. I myself shall never forget Professor Winches- 
ter's reading and interpretation of the Ode to Duty. He 
brought out the impressiveness of the truth it teaches with 
such hushing conviction. Another friend spoke of the way 
in which he handled his books, which was characteristic, 
and suggestive of his bearing toward literature in the large. 
For, being one of the most genuinely modest of men, — 
judicial as was his criticism, — he always approached great 
works of literature with a very winning kind of respect. 
The loving way in which he taught literature, in itself, 
opened many a man's eyes. As has been well said, "he 
taught his students to think while feeling, and to feel while 
thinking, and he taught them to love literature while teach- 
ing them to know it." And whatever his audience, he 
always made the individuals that composed it feel that they 
were one with him in knowledge, insight, and appreciation. 
Or perhaps our fondest memory may be of Professor Win- 
chester in the seminar where his way of welcoming every 
man's point of view, and yet bringing all the wandering 
question and comment round to some definite conclusion in 
the end was a marvel of generalship in teaching. And how 
we came to watch for the glint of humor in his eye ! — sign 
of a gift that kept his view of life wholesome, and en- 
livened many a page as well as many an hour. Or yet 
again we may best remember him as he conducted morning 
prayers at chapel, for religion was deep and essential in 
the man. He had the poet's love for beauty, and a sunni- 
ness of outlook upon life, but he had the poet's aspiration 
as well; he felt with distinguishing force "how near to good 



PREFACE ix 

is what is fair"; his predilection for Milton in Contus, for 
Wordsworth, Ruskin, Browning, was evidence of a trait in 
himself which made the desire of beauty lead to spiritual 
things. 

More friends than any but the editor can realize have 
materially contributed toward the bringing out of this book. 
Of course it would never have been at all but for the gen- 
erous devotion of her who was always nearest and dearest 
to him. We are especially fortunate in having the Intro- 
duction written by one whose peculiarly rich experience of 
life and fine cultural sense enabled him to place Professor 
Winchester among critics of literature, the more justly for 
being free of the bias of personal acquaintance. And col- 
laboration has been far-reaching. It has extended all the 
way from former students who have helped in selection, 
colleagues, or professors in other colleges, who have given 
us the benefit of their advice or knowledge or service in 
proof-reading, even to utter strangers who have taken upon 
themselves irksome tasks merely out of sympathy with our 
endeavor. Professor Winchester's was just the spirit to 
appreciate such ministration of friendliness, and the book 
stands as witness to the generous aid and kindly co-opera- 
tion of all. Let us inscribe it as it thus fitly goes forth fos- 
tered by manifold friendship : 

To all those who were his students 

in any sort 

and are ever his friends. 

Louis Bliss Gillet. 
22 February, 1922. 



NOTE 

All the papers here collected are now printed for the 
first time except those on Ruskin, Clough, and Bronson Al- 
cott. The latter are reprinted through the courtesy of the 
Methodist Review, where they appeared in the numbers for 
March 1900, September 1906, and July 19 19, respec- 
tively. No manuscript has been found of Professor Win- 
chester's earliest and repeatedly called for ^ lecture, An Eve- 
ning in London a Hundred Years Ago. Fewer examples of 
his lectures on the writers between 1789 and 1832 have been 
included, though Memories of the English Lakes was 
among the most popular, because of his books dealing with 
this period, Wordsworth: How to Know Him, and A Group 
of English Essayists. A Bibliography of nearly all his pub- 
lished writings will be found in the Memorial issued by 
Wesleyan University in 1921, the year following his death. 
Of course none of the following papers, except the three 
previously printed, received the benefit of Professor Win- 
chester's revision for publication. But they are perhaps 
as interesting in their present state since, being in practically 
the form in which they were delivered, they show in what 
pure English and in what a finished style it was natural for 
their author to speak. The vignette on the title-page is a 
miniature reproduction of an old crayon drawing of Ludlow 
Castle by Mrs. Winchester, — one of a set which in the early 
days illustrated, and, as Professor Winchester was fond of 
telling his friends, greatly increased the popularity of his 
lecture. The texts of the Cambridge Editions published by 
Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. have been used for the 
longer quotations from the poets. A British custom of using 

* Professor Winchester told the editor in 1908 that he supposed he had 
delivered the companion lecture, An Old Castle, three hundred times. 



xii NOTE 

single quotation marks to indicate inexact or slightly appro- 
priated quotations has been followed; and words and 
phrases that Professor Winchester in lecturing inserted for 
any reason into quoted texts are set off in brackets. The 
footnotes, unless signed by initials in brackets, are the au- 
thor's own. 

L. B. G. 



INTRODUCTION 

I am told that our Oxford Professor of English Litera- 
ture, Sir Walter Raleigh, once said: "Of all the men I 
have met in America the most interesting was a man by 
the name of Winchester, from a place I never heard of 
called Wesleyan." I too had never heard of Winchester 
or Wesleyan till I was introduced to both through a friend 
during my first visit to America in 1920, about a month 
after Winchester's death. 

"Interesting" is not the first epithet we generally apply 
to scholars or dons. Few teachers make even their teaching 
interesting. At all events, after the customary years in an 
English Public School and the greatest of our Universities, 
I remember only one who taught me anything interesting — 
anything vital, anything that touched my life. I suppose it 
is its effect upon life that is the test of teaching, and that is 
why the teacher is so much more important than the thing 
taught that the subject does not really matter in com- 
parison. It is because so few Professors and dons have 
this influence upon life, or have even much intimacy with 
life, that so few are called interesting. 

With distant but reverent admiration I think of the 
verbal scholar, the emendator of classic texts, the authority 
upon minute particles of speech, like the honoured corpse 
at the Grammarian's Funeral, of whom it was written, 

This man decided not to Live but Know. 

By all means let us rejoice at assisting in a grammarian's 
funeral — the elevated funeral upon the mountain top. But 
for interest we must go to life — the life common to all who 
pass from darkness into darkness through this dimly torch- 
lit world. 



xlv INTRODUCTION 

It might be thought an easy matter to make the teach- 
ing of literature interesting; for literature is closely con- 
nected with life; more closely than language, and quite as 
closely as history. Yet I believe English literature to be 
just the most difficult of all subjects to teach. So far as 
merely getting knowledge into the pupils' heads goes, it 
is far easier to make them learn Euclid or arithmetic or the 
Greek verbs. About all literature there is something in- 
tangible and indefinite as compared with other studies like 
mathematics or physical science ; and to an English-speaking 
student English literature appears so simple that it may 
be taken as a kind of relaxation, but I am old-fashioned and 
wise enough to know that good teaching draws a very 
sharp line between work and play. Besides, the teaching of 
most literature is inextricably complicated by an element 
which lurks in it as in all the arts, and can never be taught 
at all — the incalculable element of beauty. Everything else 
can be taught up to a certain point, either by sympathetic 
understanding or by the ancient method of cruelty. But no 
power on earth or in heaven can drive the perception of 
beauty into a head which has it not. 

I once heard a lecturer begin by calling upon his audi- 
ence "to join him in culling a few choice and fj-agrant flowers 
from the Shakespearian fields." Refusing to cull, I heard 
no more; for even to those who know what beauty is, a 
selection of beauties grows as tedious as a succession of 
anecdotes or jokes. If you get hold of a whole volume 
of Punch, you may think you are going to have a really 
good time, but within ten minutes you are bored so stiff 
that you long for Paradise Lost or the Differential Calculus 
or anything that is no joke. In the same way we soon 
sicken of special beauties that critics point out for our ad- 
miration, as Swinburne, for instance, sometimes did in his 
literary rhapsodies. That was not Professor Winchester's 
way. He presents us with no tempting tit-bits. He culls 
no pretty flowers. He does not pick the phrase, but leaves 
us to find it where it grew. Literature to him was no 



INTRODUCTION xv 

collection of labeled specimens, but a living thing, bounte- 
ous as nature. In an address of 19 19, he truly said (and 
in certain precious circles it would require some courage 
to say it), — "No really good literature was ever born of 
merely aesthetic impulse." 

Some literary critics yield to another temptation — the 
temptation of running off into paradoxes and whimsies be- 
cause the highroad of judgment seems so tame and well- 
trodden. One wasted part of genius so valuable to man- 
kind in proving that the Odyssey was written by a girl, as 
though that mattered; another that Dante's Beatrice was 
a species of theology; another that Shakespeare wrote the 
Sonnets for fun or hire. A good many have wasted time 
(which, certainly, can have been of little value) in demon- 
strating that Bacon was Shakespeare, and a large number 
have set out to prove that one great writer is greater than 
another great writer, as though they could weigh genius 
by Apothecaries' Weight. From all these vagaries and 
mare's-nesting excursions Winchester was mercifully pre- 
served by a certain "horse sense." Even Matthew Arnold 
was hardly a saner critic. He had no shrinking fear of 
sanity, no pernickety hesitation in permitting his judgment 
to coincide with the judgment of the "Orbis Terrarum." 
There are points in which I do not agree with him. I 
think he is inclined to insist too much upon the definitely 
moral teaching of great literature. In speaking of Antony 
and Cleopatra, for instance, I should not myself describe 
their relation as "sin." Their passion was too superb, 
their tragedy too overwhelming for the pulpit word. Again, 
I think Winchester too easily forgives Henry V for his 
callous betrayal of Falstaff, to me the greatest of all 
Shakespeare's creations. I do not agree that As You 
Like It is the best of the comedies. I doubt if it is a good 
acting comedy at all, though the charm of its language and 
of the characters enthralls us. Still less do I agree that 
Sterne is "sentimentaHsm incarnate." But these are small 
and possibly private objections. Almost without exception, 



xvi INTRODUCTION 

Winchester keeps the broad highway of judgment. "Se- 
curus judicat." It is proverbially difficult to give a personal 
and individual touch to widely accepted themes. "Difficile 
est proprie communia dicere." 

Let us take two examples of his criticism to illustrate 
both his common sense and his individuality. It is obvious 
from all his work that he felt the keenest delight in the 
Elizabethan and nineteenth century poets. In them he 
found the emotion and the beauty of expression that he 
most required in literature. Yet, when we are confronted 
with the modern school which regards imagery alone as 
constituting poetry, and in reading a poet takes no account 
of the intention, design, or "architecture" of the poem, but 
marks only the lines of images, similes, metaphors, or 
picturesque words, how encouraging it is for us who believe 
that these beautiful things should be but the ornaments 
and decorations of a great structure to come upon such 
a passage as this: 

For my part, I should certainly prefer the poetry of the early 
nineteenth century to the poetry of the early eighteenth century; 
and yet, in these days when so much stress is laid upon the picturesque, 
the suggestive, or even the mere musical functions of poetry, — ^when 
Mr. Addington Symonds thinks Shelley has realized the miracle of 
"making words altogether detached from any meaning the substance 
of a new ethereal music," — I say it is not altogether unpleasant to 
take up this old-fashioned verse whose first charm is clear and pithy 
meaning. And the matter of which this poetry is made up, if it be 
neither novel nor moving, has at least that first mark of classic 
literature, universality. 

And when critics plague us with ecstasy over the beauties 
of "poetic prose," or try to carry us away upon the glory 
of rolling periods and sounding rhetoric, what a city of 
refuge from them we may find in this passage about prose 
style in the essay upon my own favorite writer, Jonathan 
Swift: 

Language to Swift was simply the vehicle of thought. No 
English writing better combines the three virtues of clearness, sim- 
plicity, vigor. "Proper words in proper places" is his curt definition 



INTRODUCTION xvii 

of style. Admiration for style apart from the meaning beneath it 
he would have considered the mark of mere literary preciosity, — as 
it usually is. It is true indeed that the greatest masters of modern 
prose have at their command felicities of arrangement and cadence, 
and a subtle use of the suggestive power of words, by means of 
which they can convey their thought not only with all its flexures 
of meaning but with all its delicate nimbus of emotion. But Swift 
needed no such niceties, for there was no subtlety or delicacy in his 
nature. Literary elaboration always seemed to him to imply artifice 
or pedantry. 

This quiet good sense, as solid and assured as Johnson's 
own, lies at the foundation of Winchester's excellence as a 
critic. But, above that, rose his fine sympathy with noble 
emotion, and that incommunicable sense of beauty of which 
we spoke. He possessed by birth, and he retained, a 
passionate love of the best literature; and I think it must 
be hard to retain such a passion for the subject that a 
man teaches. Literature to him was part of life, or rather 
it was life itself as viewed in human thought. It was the 
description and interpretation, often the inspiration, of 
life. As he said in his speech at the dinner given in his 
honor less than a year before he died : 

Literature is the best thought that has been touched and vitalized 
with emotion and uttered in a manner of lasting charm. Thus 
defined, literature is obviously the best interpreter of life — the life 
of the individual man and the life of historical periods. For the 
temper of a man depends not merely nor principally upon what he 
thinks, but upon what he feels; the character of an age depends not 
merely upon its permanent intellectual qualities, but upon its dom- 
inant tone of feeling. It is not too much to say that if we wish to 
know any life outside the little circle of our own personal acquain- 
tance, we must know it largely through books. 

For literature under this definition his love, as I said, 
remained unshaken, in spite of all the weariness and repeti- 
tion Implied In a Professor's labor. His appreciation was 
inspired by an Innate sense of beauty, and guided by an 
Imperturbable sanity. By his historic Imagination, as seen 
in Jn Old Castle, he was able to connect the literature of 
any age with its contemporary world, and by his wide 



xviii INTRODUCTION 

tolerance, in matters of ordinary behavior as well as in 
questions of literary taste (as seen in his essays upon Swift 
and Burns), he escaped the snares of seclusiveness and 
preciosity. But, above all, it was his insistance upon the 
unity of life with literature that gave his writing and his 
teaching their finest value. For these reasons I can well 
understand what a radiant experience it must have been 
for the young to come under his influence; and I can well 
understand what a mature scholar meant by calling him the 
most interesting man he had met in America. 

Henry W. Nevinson. 
London, Oct. i, 192 1. 



CONTENTS 



FAUB 



Introduction by Henry W. Nevinson xiii 

An Old Castle i 

As You Like It 36 

Antony and Cleopatra 64 

The Winter's Tale 91 

Shakespeare the Man 115 

The Literature of the Age of Queen Anne: General 

Characteristics of the Age 133 

The Literature of the Age of Queen Anne: Politics, 

Parties, and Persons I57 

The Life of Jonathan Swift 181 

Robert Burns 237 

John Ruskin 267 

Browning: General Characteristics 291 

Art, Love, and Religion in the Poetry of Robert 

Browning 326 

Arthur Hugh Clough 362 

A New England Mystic 381 



AN OLD CASTLE 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 



AN OLD CASTLE 

IN the west of England, just on the border of Wales, 
in a sweet and smiling landscape, where, to the east, 
far as the eye can reach, stretch green, rolling meadows 
broken by waving fields of yellow grain and fair-blooming 
orchards, with here and there a cottage or a manor-house 
"bosomed high in tufted trees," its blue wreath of evening 
smoke curling slowly up ; and where, to the west, rise gentle 
hills green and smooth to the summit save now and then 
for a reach of noble forest, and, on the distant horizon, the 
dim blue outline of the mountains of Wales : in this lovely 
country lies, at the junction of the broad, shallow rivers 
Teme and Corve, the sleepy old town of Ludlow. It is not 
much visited by American sight-seers I take it, though few 
towns in England are better worth the seeing. The two 
rivers meet at an acute angle, and the town lies just within 
the angle. As you enter it from the railway and walk 
up its quaint and straggling main street, you find yourself 
slowly climbing a long hill. Halfway up you may stop 
for a bit of meat and drink at the Three Feathers, a de- 
lightfully old hostelry of the sixteenth century. Farther 
up, as you near the apex of the angle and the junction 
of the two rivers, almost at the top of the hill, is the 
venerable church of St. Lawrence; and a few rods farther, 
at the very top of the hill, and just at the junction of the 
rivers, where the steep bluff falls sheer down into the brawl- 
ing stream below, there stands, noble though in ruin, the 
Old Castle of Ludlow. 

The street of the town leads straight up to the castle 



2 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

wall that bars your way. But in the great outer gate is 
now only an old oaken door, and that is invitingly open all 
day long. The outer court which you enter is now a broad, 
smooth lawn, enclosed on three sides by the low curtain 
walls over which the great beech trees hang their branches. 
But turning to the right, you face, on the fourth side, the 
towering wall of the great inner court, or castle proper. 
Passing over a bridge that spans the old moat, now filled 
with vines and climbing greenery, you pass through the 
high-arched gate, under the shadow of the great keep, the 
rusty teeth of the old portcullis grinning in their socket over 
you, and enter the inner court. You are in the Middle 
Ages. The little court of perhaps half an acre is bright 
and sunny, but there is a sullen stillness in the air, and the 
grim walls that shut in around you, keeping silent the 
secret of centuries, will throw a hush upon you as you enter 
their solemn circuit. Time has laid his hand but gently 
on this old castle. Its bold masses rise as they rose half 
a millennium ago, its grand outlines still entire, though 
softened a little here and there by the gradual touches of 
decay. Roofs are gone, and the floors are green turf now; 
ivy has mantled all one side of the court, and the whole is 
slowly yielding to the tooth of time. But you may still 
clamber down into the dungeons at the base of the great 
keep, — one of the oldest in England, for it was built only 
sixteen years after the Conquest, more than eight hundred 
years ago, — and then you can mount by broken stair from 
story to story till you emerge quite at the top and look 
out toward the sunny meadow a mile away that was once 
reddened by the blood of Bo&worth battle; or you can pick 
your way through the mass of noble building on the opposite 
side of the court, — armories, state-apartments, banqueting 
hall, — clambering up to get a nearer view of some bit of 
quaint carving, or a glimpse of green landscape framed in 
some long, narrow window, or to come out now and then 
into some curious little bower, built in the thickness of the 
wall, lighted by a tiny slit in the gray stone, and just large 
enough for a lover, a lady, and a lute. 



AN OLD CASTLE 3 

And when you have wearied yourself by your climbing 
among the ruins you may lie upon the sunny sward in the 
court and dream away a summer afternoon in mingled 
reminiscence and imagination of the scenes and the men 
these walls have looked upon. They could tell you 
many a story of early English history, of Waltef Lacey and 
Arnold De Lisle and Maid Marian, of Edward III and his 
cruel mother, Isabella. During all the bloody Wars of the 
Roses the tide of varying battle surged around this castle, 
and the turf where you lie was stained again and again by 
the blood of the red and the white rose. In yonder rooms 
at the northeast corner lived for a time Edward IV's two 
sons, before they went up to London to meet that mys- 
terious death in the Tower that every schoolboy has heard 
of. Hither came some years later sad-faced Catherine of 
Aragon from her royal parents, Ferdinand and Isabella; 
yonder tower where she lived for a few short months with 
her boy husband. Prince Arthur, is still called by her name. 
Pleasant hour of calm before the storm of her life : for 
when her husband died, you remember, she went from here 
to marry his brother, Henry VIII, and her divorce from 
him turned Europe upside down and made the English 
Church. 

But the associations of Ludlow that are of most in- 
terest and on which I wish to linger are of yet a little later 
date. From 1559 till the close of the sixteenth century this 
castle was an official residence of a noble family which 
numbered in it some of the greatest names of England's 
greatest age, and whose list of personal acquaintance com- 
prised almost that whole circle of statesmen, adventurers, 
and poets whose renown fills 

The spacious times of great Elizabeth 
With sounds that echo still. 

Ludlow Castle was then the seat of the Lord President of 
Wales, to whom was entrusted a wide jurisdiction over the 
affairs of that country; and in 1559, shortly after Elizabeth 
came to the throne, she appointed to that office, Sir Henry 



4 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Sidney. Sidney and his son-in-law, Henry Herbert, Earl 
of Pembroke, held the office until 1601. 

England from 1560 to 1600 — what an age it wasl 
We must try to realize it, if we would understand those 
men whose figures loom so vast upon the scene of history. 
Never before, perhaps, in the history of the world had 
fifty years wrought so great changes in any country as had 
been wrought for England during the fifty years before 
Henry Sidney took his place at Ludlow. The whole face 
of the country was changed. The feudal system had mostly 
passed away. Quiet and peaceful days had come at last. 
The old castles like this of Ludlow, that had been for four 
centuries the centers of battle and siege, ceased now to be 
fortresses any more and were turned into knightly palaces. 
It was the beginning of modern life, you see. The nobles 
no longer came to court with two-handed sword and shield, 
but in satin doublet and velvet cloak, laced with gold and 
sparkling with jewels. They builded themselves, says the 
old chronicler, Harrison, fair manor-houses of "brick or 
hard stone, . . . their rooms large and comelie, ... so 
magnificent and statelie as the basest house of a baron doth 
often match in our dayes with some honors of princes in old 
time." Inside these fair and comely houses, though you 
would find only rushes under your feet as yet, there is 
gorgeous tapestry of Arras upon the walls, there is costly 
linen in the presses, there is abundance of silver and gold 
plate upon the board, — to the value, says old Har- 
rison, of two thousand pounds at the least in any noble- 
man's house (equal, you know, to seventy-five thou- 
sand dollars nowadays). You sat in chairs, you sat 
at tables, whose carved richness and beauty are the despair 
of modern imitators; and you looked out over the green 
English country through windows of clear glass newly 
brought from Flanders or Normandy. And when your 
imagination can reproduce for you the vision of these noble 
old rooms, lighted with little diamond-paned windows, with 
the high, open-timbered roof overhead, the gray walls 
bright with tapestry and hung with armor, the floor strewn 



AN OLD CASTLE 5 

with rushes, then, in this quaint setting, frame the glittering 
picture of the knights and ladies of those times. We have 
forgotten what dress is. The Puritans carried the day 
in this as in other matters. Perhaps it is as well; but how 
picturesque, what a thing of glittering beauty must have 
been the costume of that time ! It is only on the canvas 
of a Titian or a Rubens that it lives any longer for us. 
You must think of the fine gentleman with a tight-fitting 
doublet of scarlet satin, embroidered with gold and slashed 
to show the rich laces underneath, a ruff at his neck, a 
cloak of white sables costing a thousand ducats, black 
trunk-hose covered with lace, rose-colored nether socks from 
Venice; velvet shoes of blue with rubies in the buckles, or 
perhaps boots with falling tops out of which gushed a cloud 
of lace in which you caught the glint of gems; in the hilt of 
his sword sparkles a great diamond, and all Arabia breathes 
as he passes by ! Yet do not say this is the mere foppery 
of pusillanimous gallants. These men are the conquerors 
of the world, and next year mayhap will be parching with 
pestilence while fighting the Spaniard in the swamps of 
Central America, or dying of cold amid the snows of the 
polar sea. No, it is the joy and pride of life, the rich 
prodigality of power, the new sense of all the goodliness 
of this brave world that blossoms in this outward mag- 
nificence. What else were gold and jewels for? And of 
gold and jewels the land was full. When Francis Drake's 
ship, having harried the Spaniards in every water under 
the whole heaven, and flown like some swift secret thing 
around the world, at last came home to Plymouth Harbour, 
the little craft was laden down with treasures to the value 
of eight hundred thousand pounds sterling, or in the money 
of to-day at least twenty-five million dollars, — five dollars 
for every man, woman, and child in England. Think of 
that. And as to the dress of the ladies, — far be it from 
me to attempt to describe that: we know it kept well in 
advance of that of the gentlemen. Doesn't every school 
girl know that Queen Elizabeth had three thousand dresses 
in her wardrobe, and have we not all in mind that well- 



6 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

known picture in which she struts to all posterity in the 
gorgeous though ugly costume In which Zucchero painted 
her? 

But It was not the rich only who felt the general tide 
of prosperity. In the farm houses, says chronicler Har- 
rison, there were three great changes that all men noticed. 
One was the multitude of chimneys newly built, when afore- 
time the fire was on the floor; another was the use of 
pillows, when once men were contented with a good round 
log; and the third was the change from wooden vessels to 
those of pewter or tin. 

But far more important and more wonderful than these 
merely material changes, among high or low, were the 
changes in ideas the English mind had experienced in fifty 
years. The transition here from medieval life to modern 
<> life was made In a single generation. Suppose you had been 
a man of three-score when Henry Sidney went to Ludlow 
in 1559 ; think of what changes you could have told ! When 
you were a boy, most likely, even though of gentle birth, 
you did not learn to read or write at all. The first Earl 
of Pembroke, I remember old Aubrey says, "could not read 
or write, but did have a great stamp to his name." There 
was fighting all the time and little prospect of anything 
else, with the chance that whichever side you took you 
might lose your head for not taking the other. And, in- 
deed. If you had any leisure or liking to read, what was 
the good? In English there was little save old Dan 
Chaucer that was worth the reading, and in French there 
was nothing better; Greek was an unknown tongue, and 
Latin was a priests' tongue in which there was nothing but 
devotion and philosophy that no man with blood in him 
cared for. As for knowledge, men knew all that was 
worth knowing. They knew that this earth was a wide 
plain, — you had seen with the monks at the abbey a map 
that showed the whole of It. If you sailed away toward 
the setting sun, you would come after some days to the 
edge, where the waters rolled off to the abyss below. To 
the east you might go somewhat farther, past the Holy 



AN OLD CASTLE 7 

Land to Cathay and the great Caspian Sea, where the 
people had long tails and feet so big they used them for 
umbrellas, and quite beyond all, on the farther edge, was 
the distant land of the great Emperor of Tartary of whom 
wondrous things were written (so you had heard), in the 
Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Yet the whole was not 
so very large; a year's travel would take you to the farthest 
verge, — if only you cared to go. And over your head, 
above the solid blue arch of the sky on which rolled every 
day the great orb of the sun, there was heaven, God, and 
the blessed saints. Down somewhere beneath your feet on 
the underside of this solid earth there was hell and purga- 
tory, where you trusted your soul would not stay long, as 
you would leave a handsome chantry, for the priests to 
sing it out. And this you knew was all. You understood 
it all well enough. You had the evidence of your senses for 
it. You no more doubted the accuracy of your knowledge 
than you doubted that your blood stood still in your veins 
like water in a bottle. You knew enough: the thing to 
do in this life was to take care of yourself with your strong 
right arm; as to the life to come, that the priests would 
take care of, — what else were they for? And as one man 
in every three was a priest, it was likely to be well taken 
care of. 

So you thought when you were young. But you 
had lived to see all that changed. Instead of thinking this 
earth flat, you had lived to know that it was round, and 
that there was a wonderful new world just on the other 
side of it, — great rivers that ran over sands of gold, 
Amazons, and men whose heads did grow beneath their 
shoulders. And although you couldn't well understand it 
all, yet you couldn't well doubt it, either; for hadn't you 
yourself seen at Plymouth the ship that had sailed quite 
round the world and come home without ever turning back 
at all? You had been told that the sun didn't move, but 
that the earth itself was rolling instead; and you were al- 
most ready to believe that, for now somehow the very 
grounds of belief seemed different from what they used 



8 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

to be, and you had learned not to trust your senses. But 
if so, your whole cosmogony was changed. This arch 
above was not an arch at all. Where then was heaven? 
Where was hell ? You thought you knew once, but it was 
hardly worth while to guess now. This world, at all events, 
was a vaster place than you had ever dreamed of. It was 
perhaps enough to know that. Your son had gone with 
Sir Francis Drake and you wished you could go too. 

But you had heard stranger things even than this of 
the New World. When you were a boy men came to 
Oxford to teach the new learning, to teach the new tongue, 
Greek. There was something to read now. Your son could 
read Homer, and iEschylus, and Plato, and Virgil, and 
Seneca. A whole new world had opened to the imagination 
here, too. And what perhaps was strangest of all: you had 
lived to see the Bible put into your English tongue, chained 
up in the church a while, under old King Hal, — whom after 
all you were somewhat proud of, though, to be sure, he 
wasn't exactly a saint, — then taken down and burned by 
Mary, and now you had a copy of your own. You had 
seen a deal of burning for religion, now for believing and 
now for disbelieving what seemed to you about the same 
things; but you had kept your own counsel and made up 
your mind for yourself, slowly, as well as you could. The 
monks were gone, that you were glad of; and now that Her 
Gracious Majesty, young Queen Elizabeth had come to the 
throne, and quiet days were here, you felt certain that, 
whatever religion was right, that of Spain and Rome, the 
enemies of your queen and country, was not right. Spain 
was of the devil, — that you were sure of, and with God's 
good grace, you and your sons would fight her to the 
death. 

Ah, but suppose you had been a young man then, — 
born into the new order of things, with a new faith to 
keep, a new country to defend, a new queen to serve, a 
new world to conquer! 'Bliss was it then to be alive, 
but to be young was very heaven I' Our age is doubtless 
best for you and me; but never again will the pulse of 



AN OLD CASTLE 9 

humanity bound so high, never again, it seems to me, can 
there be so much to rouse curiosity and stimulate imagina- 
tion, as in that morning of modern life. The story of those 
days told even now over the lapse of three cold centuries 
stirs the blood like a trumpet peal. All England was 
seething with a strange new life. Within fifty years the 
creeds of ten centuries had been swept away. The last 
page of history was filled with the story of revolution and 
bright with the records of hero and martyr. Beyond the 
seas lay a New World, its wonders the vision and the dream 
of poetry, its untold wealth the glittering prize of ad- 
venture. Old things were done away; all things were new; 
and England, freest and fairest of the nations, under her 
virgin Queen was to lead the van in the work of regenerat- 
ing the world by the word of the Gospel and the knightly 
sword. 

It is of these days that your afternoon at Ludlow will 
remind you most, and of the family that lived here then, — 
the family that, as I have said, represents in its own mem- 
bers and in its circle of intimate acquaintance, better than 
any other family, the courtesy, the romance, the poetry, if 
not the statesmanship, of the great age. 

Sir Henry Sidney was a little past middle life when his 
young queen appointed him President of the Welsh 
Marches and sent him to Ludlow, — "a man," says his 
friend Lord Brooke, "of excellent natural wit, large heart, 
and sweet conversation," a courtier and a soldier. He had 
known already many of the changes of the great world. 
He had been the best friend of Edward VI, and had that 
boy king listened to such advice as Sidney's, his rule would 
have been wiser if not longer. And when that misguided 
monarch closed his little day of rule, it was in Henry 
Sidney's arms that he breathed his last, and Henry Sidney's 
hand that closed the royal eyes. Keeping a discreet retire- 
ment during the bitter reign of Mary, both for his own 
sake and his wife's, he was called to duty at once by Eliza- 
beth, and both here at Ludlow, and afterward in Ireland, 
served his royal mistress well. But his wife, Mary Sidney, 



lo AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

was of more famous line than he. Very charming are the 
glimpses we can get of her through the glooms of inter- 
vening centuries. Of the dangers that wait upon high 
station she had known more than enough in her earlier 
days. Her father was that proud earl of Northumberland 
who tried to govern Edward VI, and her brother Guildford 
was the young husband of the fair Lady Jane Grey. And 
when the ambition of her father sought to place her brother 
Guildford and her sister-in-law, Lady Jane, upon the 
throne of England, Mary Sidney had seen her father, and 
her brother Guildford, and her dear friend and sister, Lady 
Jane, all perish together by the headsman's axe. The 
shadow of that "Black Monday" was never wholly lifted 
from her life. She was often at the court of Elizabeth; 
but, as one who knew her said, "she chose rather to hide 
herself from the curious eyes of a delicate time," and to find 
at her home at Penshurst and here at Ludlow, where she 
often came with her husband, fittest scene in which to play 
a noble woman's part. For she was yet a Dudley, with the 
high ambition, the generous appreciation of greatness that 
marked that family. She was worthy of her heroic age, 
and it was her just pride to have given to that age a son 
and a daughter who will be remembered to all future time 
as patterns of all that is knightly in man, and all that is 
winning in woman. 

But if Mary Sidney had wished to shine at the court 
of Elizabeth, she would have lacked no opportunity of ad- 
vancement. For her surviving brother — and it would 
seem an affectionate and trusted brother — was Robert 
Dudley, the great Earl of Leicester, prime favorite of 
Queen Elizabeth, and for nearly twenty years foremost 
man in the court of England. What shall we think of this 
great Lord Leicester? Shall we think him merely the 
shallow intriguing courtier who won the favor of his queen 
by a handsome figure, a courtly dress, and a flattering 
tongue; who was incapable of any genuine devotion to any 
person or any cause; who broke the neck of pretty Amy 
Robsart — as Sir Walter tells us in Kenihvorth — when 



AN OLD CASTLE ii 

she stood in the way of that marriage with Queen Eliza- 
beth for which he had dared to hope; who, when 'the bolt 
of Cupid missed the imperial votaress throned by the west,' 
poisoned the Earl of Essex that he might marry the 
Countess Lettice, — that 

little western flower, 
Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound: 

who respected neither truth, purity, nor loyalty, and fell a 
victim at last to the black arts by which he had so often com- 
passed the destruction of others ? So we have often been told 
to think, since the Jesuit Parsons first printed his filthy pack 
of lies, and saucy Naunton, silly chamberman of Queen 
Elizabeth, wrote his Relation. But what shall we say then of 
those who numbered him among their friends? Queen 
Elizabeth loved this man, nay, the woman Elizabeth loved 
this man, and had she not known that marriage could not be 
her lot, would have married him; repressed her affection for 
him, yea, denied it, with what bitter unavailing regrets of her 
lonely woman's soul no man may say. And was Elizabeth, 
with all her follies, the woman to be won by the drop of a 
feather, the shape of a leg, or the turn of a compliment? 
Sir Philip Sidney, pattern gentleman and knight, loved and 
honored this Leicester, not merely, it should seem, because 
he was his uncle, but because he was a man; and when 
Leicester was assailed by the tongue of slander, it was Sidney 
who flamed out into indignant denial of the charge. When 
the great, pure. Christian poet of that age, Edmund 
Spenser, wrote his epic. The Faery Queen, he said that 
the central figure in that poem, Prince Arthur, friend of 
all the good and knightly, and foe of all the base, was 
meant to represent his dear friend and patron, Robert, 
Earl of Leicester. Was Edmund Spenser the man who 
could consent, for the sake of servile flattery, to give the 
place of honor in the great Elizabethan epic to a shallow 
courtier, an adulterer, and a murderer? I cannot think so 
hardly of Leicester or of his friends. Something worthy 
he must have had to win such friends. A great man he 



12 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

certainly was not, — no great warrior, no great statesman. 
He belonged rather to that other class of men, who, while 
they cannot achieve greatness themselves, have the grace 
to appreciate it in others. He had a quick eye and open 
heart for most that was brightest and best in the England 
of his day. He called men of letters and art about him- 
self. No statesman, he saw which way led the path of 
honor for his country; he was a Protestant from the start. 
Enthusiasm, generous sympathies, a fine bloom of courtesy, 
— these are not the stuff of which the highest virtues are 
made, but they are very winning nevertheless. My Lord 
of Leicester did not always follow the narrow path of 
honor, I fear; but he wished well to those who did, and 
I think his sins were those of an easy pliancy of nature, 
rather than of native villainy. A man whose grandfather, 
father, and brother have all perished on the scaffold for 
purely political offenses may perhaps be excused if his wari- 
ness sometimes degenerated into intrigue. 

But if it is only with grave reservations that one can 
commend the brilliant Lord Leicester, it is with admira- 
tion unqualified that one turns to his nephew, the son of 
Mary and Henry Sidney. Who hasn't fashioned in his 
imagination the picture of Sir Philip Sidney? Who doesn't 
know the story — only too short a story — of his life? 
There is little of incident in it; it is only one bright glimpse 
that we can get of this pattern knight of the sixteenth 
century; yet this glimpse irradiates his age and still shines 
serene through the glooms of history. When his father 
took possession of this castle of Ludlow, Philip Sidney was 
a boy of five, and, growing up a grave and studious lad, was 
sent to Shrewsbury School. Very wise and tender are the 
letters his mother wrote him there. A little later at Ox- 
ford, with the keen intellectual curiosity of his age, the 
young man intermeddled with all learning, gaining what- 
soever was to be learned there, and, with powers of re- 
flection beyond his years, ripening his learning into the 
richer fruit of wisdom. He had a year at court with his 
uncle Leicester, and then he went abroad to see Europe. 



AN OLD CASTLE 13 

To see Europe, in those days, as very likely in these, did 
many a young fellow more harm than good. So thought 
old Roger Ascham, Elizabeth's schoolmaster, who de- 
clared a year or so before young Sidney went away that 
young men usually brought home from Italy "for learning, 
less commonly than they carried out with them; for policy, a 
factious heart, a discoursing head, a mind to meddle in all 
men's matters; for experience, plenty of new mischiefs never 
known in England before; for manners, variety of vanities, 
and change of filthy living." "I was once in Italy myself," 
said blunt old Ascham, "but I thank God my abode there 
was but nine days." But it was something better than this 
that young Sidney learned abroad. He learned to know the 
great forces of Europe that were arrayed against each 
other for the desperate struggle of history. He was in 
Paris on the night of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, 
safely housed with his friend, the English envoy, Sir Francis 
Walsingham. He went on to Italy, — the bad brilliant 
Italy of Galileo and Machiavelli, of Raphael and Pope 
Sixtus. He came back to England through Strasburg, and 
Frankfort, and Leyden. He had seen both sides; he had 
made up his mind. Henceforth he would be something 
more than a courtier, something more than a scholar: he 
would be a soldier in the great battle against sin and anti- 
christ, against the King of Spain and the Pope of Rome. 
But what rare charm was it that won for this man, wherever 
he went, the admiring love of princes, of scholars, of sol- 
diers, of peasants? It was his Christian scholarship that 
won the heart of the saintly Huguenot Languet, "who daily 
lived as good men wish to die" ; it was the wonderful ripe- 
ness of the political opinions of this young man of twenty- 
four that commanded the admiration of William the Silent, 
who wrote to Queen Elizabeth, "Your Majesty has in 
young Mr. Sidney one of the greatest statesmen I know in 
Europe" ; it was his imagination, his enthusiasm, his taste, 
that drew around him poets like Spenser, who loved him 
with a love that bordered on idolatry; it was his manly 
beauty, grace of manner, the fine flower of courtesy that 



14 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

drew the admiring glance of courtiers and of ladies, — 
"extremely beautiful he was," says gossiping old Aubrey, 
"much like his sister" ; it was the union of all these qualities, 
"the courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword," 
the high erected thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy: 
all these, but it was something more than all these, too, 
that won for young Sidney his undying reputation as the 
pattern gentleman. It was that rarest grace of self-denial 
and self-forgetfulness in his devotion to others that has 
spread around his name the lasting fragrance of a pure 
renown, and has consecrated to posterity the story of his 
death. That story, thousands who know nothing else of 
Sidney learned in their childhood never to forget. He had 
passed some impatient years at court chafing under the re- 
strictions of Elizabeth, who protested she could not spare 
so bright an ornament; during a short season of enforced 
idleness with his sister at Wilton he had given expression 
to his enthusiasm and his poetry in that now almost for- 
gotten romance, the Arcadia; his voice, wise and eloquent 
though youthful, had been heard in parliament: but all 
this life was too tame. With the fire of youth he longed 
for the front of the battle. His heart was with the Raleighs, 
the Gilberts, the Drakes. Once, indeed, he stole away to 
Plymouth to sail with his friend Sir Francis Drake against 
the Spaniards; but Queen Elizabeth heard of it, and her 
absolute command brought him back, and he had to wait 
another year before he could at last go to the Netherlands 
with Leicester where, after nearly a year in idleness, he fell 
at Zutphen, grievously wounded. And then happened the 
incident that has immortahzed his name. "Being thirsty 
with excess of bleeding," writes his earliest biographer,^ 
"he called for drink which was presently brought him; but 
as he was putting the bottle to his mouth, he saw a poor 
soldier carried along, who had eaten his last at the same 
feast, ghastly casting up his eyes at the bottle. Which Sir 

* Old Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, that shadowy enigmatical character, 
so alluring to Lamb, who in his self-composed epitaph designates himself 
"servant to Queen Elizabeth, conceller to King James, frend to Sir Philip 
Sidney." [L. B. G.] 



AN OLD CASTLE 15 

Philip perceiving, took it from his head, before he drank, 
and delivered it to the poor man, with these words, 'Thy 
necessity is yet greater than mine.' And when he had 
pledged this poor soldier, he was presently carried to Arn- 
heim." Here he died three weeks later with words of 
Christian hope upon his lips. At his death, says his chaplain 
who watched by his side, he lifted up his eyes and hands 
uttering these words, "I would not change my joy for the 
empire of the world." So passed, at the age of thirty-two, 
a true knight, "who trod," as an old writer says, "from his 
cradle to his grave amid incense and flowers and died in a 
dream of glory." The pattern gentleman of England, is 
not that a goodly fame? I think it cannot be that any 
of the several portraits we have gives us the charm of his 
face. His best portrait was that drawn by an obscure 
anonymous writer just after his death, in the oft-quoted 
lines: 

A sweet attractive kinde of grace, 
A full assurance given by lookes, 
Continuall comfort in a face, 
The lineaments of Gospell bookes. 

One would like to know more of Philip Sidney's sister, 
Mary. Like her mother, Mary Sidney was never ambitious 
to shine in courts or to meddle with the affairs of state, 
and the records of the historian, therefore, but seldom 
mention her. But no woman of her age has a more enviable 
fame than she. About the time that Philip Sidney came 
home from his travels on the Continent, his sister Mary 
married the Earl of Pembroke, a grave and quiet man much 
older than herself. For forty years thereafter, Mary 
Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, was perhaps the one woman 
in England best worth knowing. In those days learning 
was thought to befit a woman as well as a man, and Mary 
Sidney was mistress not only of the French, Italian, and 
Latin languages, but of the Greek and Hebrew as well. 
She was a graceful writer of verse; and her house at 
Wilton — beautiful still in its quiet seclusion just within 



1 6 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

sight of the graceful cathedral spire of Salisbury — and 
her town-house in Aldersgate Street were the homes of 
learning and of poetry. Her society was sought by the 
greatest and the wisest of her day. Her brother Philip wrote 
for her amusement the Arcadia, — The Countess of Pem- 
broke's Arcadia is its name, you remember. Edmund 
Spenser sang her praise in one of his best minor poems. A 
host of lesser lyric singers fluttered about her. She was, 
it is safe to say, the patron and friend of Shakespeare him- 
self, and we know that her son, William Herbert, — after 
his father's death third Earl of Pembroke, in later days 
Chancellor of Oxford, founder of Pembroke College, the 
man who was, says Clarendon, the most universally beloved 
and esteemed of any in that age, — we know, I say, that this 
young William Herbert, Mary Sidney's son and Philip 
Sidney's nephew, was a generous and intelligent friend of 
Shakespeare. It was to him that the first folio edition of 
Shakespeare was dedicated, and if we could ever unriddle 
that world's enigma, the Sonnets of Shakespeare, I think 
it probable that we should find the "Mr. W. H." to whom 
they are dedicated to be none other than young William 
Herbert, Mary Sidney's son. It was to Mary Sidney, too, 
that Shakespeare's great compeer, Ben Jonson, dedicated 
some of his best work, with words of such wise and manly 
esteem as do credit alike to him and to her. She out- 
lived her husband many years, retaining to the last the 
increasing honor and affection of all in England whose 
regard was worth most, and when she died it was Ben 
Jonson ^ who wrote for her the beautiful and famous 
epitaph : 

Underneath this sable hearse 
Lies the subject of all verse, 
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother; 
Death, ere thou hast slain another, 
Fair, and learned, and good as she. 
Time shall throw a dart at thee. 

'Or perhaps William Browne. See note F. E. Schelling's Elizabethan 
Lyrics, pp. 294-5. [L. B. G.] 



AN OLD CASTLE 17 

There was another noble family whose relations with 
the Sidneys every one familiar with the story will recollect. 
In those relations lay the romance and the pathos of Philip 
Sidney's life. When Philip Sidney's father, Henry Sidney, 
went to take possession of this castle of Ludlow, among 
his circle of noble acquaintance was Walter Devereux, Earl 
of Essex. This Earl of Essex would seem to have been 
an honest and good man, but he had just set his hand to 
that never ending and, I fear, hopeless task of composing 
Ireland to English rule. It was, at best, a bad and bloody 
business, and my Lord of Essex made but a poor success 
of it. He marched and countermarched, killed some hun- 
dreds of kerns and gallowglasses, and, if the truth be told, 
some hundreds of Irish mothers and babies too, and, 
harassed by failure in Ireland and faction at home, was 
glad to give up the task of quieting Ireland to his friend 
Henry Sidney, who tried milder measures with but little 
better success. But before my Lord of Essex could get back 
to England he was seized with a violent illness, which 
proved the death of him. On his deathbed, says his chroni- 
cler, his chief care was for his children, lamenting the time 
which is so ungodly, lest they should learn of this vile 
world. "O my poor children," would he say, "God bless 
you and give you of his grace." Perhaps the dying father 
knew that the impetuous temper of his children portended 
for them a stormy career. At all events their after life 
justified his apprehensions. This Earl of Essex, like Henry 
Sidney, had a son and a daughter, Robert and Penelope 
Devereux, and the story of Robert Devereux, third Earl of 
Essex, and of Penelope, his sister, is quite as famous and 
romantic as that of Philip and Mary Sidney, but unhappily 
theirs is not so fair a fame. 

Penelope Devereux was only thirteen years old when 
her father died. Four years later she was the most 
beautiful woman in England. Not Bessie Throgmorton, 
the fair maid of honor who became Walter Raleigh's 
wife, not Lucy Harrington, the lovely Countess of 
Bedford, not even her own cousin, the charming Eliza- 



1 8 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

beth Vernon, Helen of the Elizabethan poets, whom 
Shakespeare's friend, the Earl of Southampton, wooed for 
five years and braved the anger of his sovereign to marry 
at last, — none of these, nor any other woman whose por- 
trait or story has come down to us, can have had, I think, 
the strangely fascinating beauty, the wild, impetuous charm 
of Penelope Devereux. Strangely enough, no portrait of 
her painted by brush of artist is known to be in existence ; 
yet her beauty has been so enshrined in poetry that it is 
not difficult to image it. Her abundant hair was of that 
hue of tawny gold which catches every gleam of the sun 
and shines in lustrous glimmerings, — "beams of gold caught 
in a net," said her lover. But her complexion, in strange 
and striking contrast to her hair, was dark, — her cheek a 
kindly claret, her face like Juliet's, full of the warm South ; 
and her eyes, under raven brows and lashes, were as black 
as night, now soft and melting, now glowing with an im- 
perial radiance. These eyes were the marvel of her face, — 
"black stars, twin children of the sun," as her lover calls 
them, — and one can fancy as he reads her story that he 
sees through all the darks of the past the soft splendor 
of their beauty. This woman with a face of such startling 
beauty, "day with its golden lights in her hair, night and 
starlight in her eyes," as one admirer says; this woman with 
the pride of a house that bore high rank in Normandy be- 
fore ever the Conqueror set foot in England : this was the 
woman who should have found her home and her fame as the 
wife of Philip Sidney. They had been intended for each 
other from childhood, and when Penelope Devereux's 
father lay dying he sent a message of regret to Philip Sidney 
that he could not live to call him son. But as the girl grew 
to womanhood the match was broken off, — no one knows 
why or by whom, — and before she was nineteen Penelope 
Devereux was forced by her guardians to marry one of the 
richest and one of the basest men in England, Lord Rich, 
a sordid, cold, brutal young fellow who had inherited the 
vast stealings of his father, Chancellor Rich. She loathed 
the man; she protested at the very altar, but in vain; and 



AN OLD CASTLE 19 

too late Philip Sidney awoke to find, as it would seem from 
some of his sonnets, that he had pressed his suit too 
languidly, and that his lady was already given to another. 
It was then that he wrote that series of sonnets, Astrophel 
and Stella, on which his fame as a poet — and as a lover — 
rests. In spite of the over-elaborate diction of the time 
in which they are written, I do not see how any one can 
read them without feeling that it is the genuine love of a 
genuine man that is written here, that Sidney, as he says 
in his first sonnet, looked in his heart and wrote. And 
let it be said in charitable memory of Penelope Devereux, 
that there is nothing in these sonnets to cast any shadow 
on her fame. Love to the cold and sordid man to whom 
she had been wedded was out of the question; but I think 
there is no reason to doubt her truth to him while Philip 
Sidney lived. Very touching and very significant are the 
earnest, passionate lines in the eighth song, in which Sidney 
tells how his lady returned his love : 

Astrophel, sayd she, my loue, 

Cease, in these effects, to proue; 

Now be still, yet still beleeue me. 

Thy griefe more then death would grieue me. 



If those eyes you praised, be 
Halfe so deare as you to me, 
Let me home returne, starke blinded 
Of those eyes, and blinder minded. 

If to secret of my hart, 

I do any wish impart. 

Where thou art not formost placed, 

Be both wish and I defaced. 

Trust me, while I thee deny. 
In my selfe the smart I try ; 
Tyran Honour doth thus vse thee, 
Stella's self might not refuse thee. 

Therefore, deare, this no more moue, 
Least, though I leaue not thy loue, 
Which too deep in me is framed, 
I should blush when thou are named, 



20 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

But some two years after the marriage of Lady Rich, 
Sidney himself married Fanny Walsingham, daughter of his 
old friend, — marriage, it will be remembered, was for the 
only son of a great English house a necessity, — and two years 
later he died. After that, much that was best in Lady 
Rich died too. Her haughty and impetuous nature was not 
likely to bear its bondage meekly. Her imperial beauty 
was full of temptations. When, now and then, her face 
gleams upon us in the poetry or letters of the time it has 
oftenest some wild light of passion on it. It has been 
plausibly conjectured that she is the "dark lady" of 
Shakespeare's Sonnets. The treatment of her husband 
seems to have passed from brutal abuse to stolid indiffer- 
ence, and after a few years he left her altogether. Then 
came the wild story of her brother Robert to cast a more 
lurid light and then a deeper shadow over her path. The out- 
lines of that story you all remember: how the young Robert 
Devereux, with much of his sister's beauty and charm of 
manner, was, after the death of Leicester, Elizabeth's 
favorite courtier; how he, too, like his father attempted 
that fatal Irish business, and failed more disastrously than 
his father; how he wasn't fortunate enough to die in Ire- 
land, but came back to London, and scolded and stormed 
like a spoiled child, and at last, when he couldn't gain the 
favor of Elizabeth, got a few fellows as foolish as himself 
into his great house in the Strand, and issued out thence, 
one Sunday morning, on a foolhardy insurrection to do no- 
body knew what, and he himself least of all. And doesn't 
every school girl know how Elizabeth, in mingled sorrow 
and pride and anger, found it necessary to sign the warrant 
for taking off the handsome head of her last favorite, 
Robert Devereux, and how she never smiled afterward? 
In all that time one can see the restless, fateful figure of 
Penelope Devereux flitting hither and thither. It was her 
ambition goaded by her misery that spurred her brother 
on to folly. "She did urge me on," said he, a few days 
before he died, "by telling me how all my friends and fol- 
lowers thought me a coward, and that I had lost my valour." 



AN OLD CASTLE 21 

One wonders whether Shakespeare didn't draw Lady Mac- 
beth from her. While her brother lay under sentence of 
death, with remorseful pity she besieged the throne for his 
pardon; she entreated, she bribed, she lay in wait at Eliza- 
beth's door and pleaded with all the eloquence of love, and 
beauty, and tears. But it was in vain : and when her brother 
perished, poor Lady Rich seems to have sunk in despair of 
happiness or of virtue. One sees her again at the court of 
James, — her wonderful charm yet undimmed; but one 
doesn't like to think of Philip Sidney's Stella as shining in 
that basest of courts. 

Yet one more life was that baleful star to destroy be- 
fore it went out. For years Lady Rich had one friend 
whose love, if not honorable, was at least constant. Lord 
Mountjoy, Earl of Devonshire, was brave, honest, and his 
honor would have been untarnished had he not loved 
Penelope Devereux too well. Through all the storm of 
her life, he had been but too true to her, and for years the 
relations of Lady Rich with himself had been no secret. 
He wished to give to those relations the sanction of law 
and of religion, and as Lady Rich had been deserted by 
her wretched husband for some twelve years, a divorce 
was granted her by Archbishop Laud and she was shortly 
afterward married to Lord Mountjoy. But the fate of 
her family was over her. There was some flaw in the 
divorce that made her new union illegal. A storm of in- 
dignation fell upon the head of Lord Mountjoy. The Earl 
winced under the charge, but he would never for a moment 
belie his love for the woman he had at last wedded. He 
wrote a letter of passionate exculpation to the cold-blooded 
hypocrite who now sat on the English throne, he pleaded 
with manly tenderness in the name of religion and of 
charity for his wife: but it was to no purpose. With much 
of that high honor that feels a stain like a wound, he sank 
under the storm of undeserved opprobrium, and died only 
four months after his marriage, in the arms of his wife. 
"The grief of his unfortunate love," says his secretary, 
"did bring him to his end." With his death the star of 



22 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Penelope Devereux went out in impenetrable night. There 
is no later story of her, no portrait, no record : only a few 
years ago in a Latin history printed in Amsterdam was 
found the statement that after his death she lay, in the 
robes of her mourning, night and day, stretched on the floor 
in the corner of her chamber, refusing to be comforted 
except by death. That kindly comfort came in a few 
months, and the beauty, the idol of two courts, whose 
charms the greatest poets of the age had sung, died for- 
gotten and alone. 

'In all the chronicles of wasted time, when beauty doth 
make beautiful old rhyme, in praise of ladies dead,' you 
shall not find a face of more supreme fascination, a story 
of sadder, sin-stained pathos than that of Sidney's Stella, 
Penelope Devereux. 

To name the friends of the Sidney family would be 
to name almost all the most famous men of the last half of 
the sixteenth century. One, there was among them, the 
friend of the Sidneys from boyhood who seems to me the 
typical, representative figure of his age. For if we look 
for one man in whom we may find combined the restless 
adventure, the splendid daring, the romantic sentiment at 
once wild and tender, the exquisite literary tastes, the noble 
patriotism, and, above all, that high and reverent religious 
feeling which blended love of country with love of God and 
made strength and valor beautiful, — all these sentiments 
so characteristic of the Elizabethan age at its best, — where 
shall we find them together, I say, save in this man, Walter 
Raleigh? What a world it was in which he lived! What a 
vast horizon of hopes ! What a rushing torrent of passion ! 
What a sinewy strength of endeavor in that Elizabethan 
life I And what men were on earth in those daysl For a 
preacher a Hooker, for a thinker z. Bacon, for poets a 
Marlowe, a Ben Jonson, a Spenser, a Shakespeare; on the 
throne a woman who had dared badger every sovereign 
in Europe ; and all round the world, sailing under the cross 
of St. George, Englishmen with their hearts beating fast 
and their imaginations on fire. And in such an age, among 



AN OLD CASTLE 23 

such men, Walter Raleigh seems to tower above them all. 
What a career I Born when the Smithfield martyr fires 
were just flickering their last, nourished on tales of adven- 
ture and heroism, he drew his virgin sword when only a lad 
in the holy cause of suffering Protestantism in the Nether- 
lands; he saw great Conde fall at Jarnac; he stood silently 
by in horror on the night of St. Bartholomew. And he 
never forgot those days. When he stormed Cadiz; when 
he hurried over the Atlantic again and again to fight the 
Spaniard amid the pestilence of the tropics, or to fix his 
hold upon the fairest lands of the New World for his 
virgin Queen; when he laughed with stern joy to see the 
great Armada sailing up the channel to its doom : through 
it all he bore the consecrated bravery of a man who had 
early taken upon himself a solemn mission of unalterable 
hostility to the foe of his country and of his religion. Mis- 
takes, yes; sins, he has to answer for; but this high purpose 
sheds around his whole life the bright air of heroism. 
"Damnably proud," says poor-spirited old gossip Aubrey; 
"too ambitious," say more modern historians. But 
Raleigh's ambition was of no mean, selfish sort. With 
truth could he say the great ends he aimed at were "his 
country's, God's, and truth's." 

At home he was the ornament of his age. No mean 
poet himself, he was the best friend of other poets; but 
for his kind encouragement the world might have never 
seen the great epic of the age, Edmund Spenser's Faery 
Queen. He had the silver tongue of the orator, and in his 
History of the World there are passages of deep and 
moving eloquence, so solemn and so grand that I am sure 
no other Englishman of his age could have written them 
save William Shakespeare only. And more than all else, 
how wise a statesman he was. It wasn't, you may be sure, 
any such pretty trick as the throwing of his gay cloak 
before the passing feet of Queen Bess that won him his 
high place in her regard. She knew Walter Raleigh for a 
wise as well as a gallant man. His views of the relations 
of England to Protestantism, his colonial policy, his com- 



24 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

mercial policy, were all far in advance of his time. We 
Americans, in especial, ought to be the first to honor his 
memory, for we owe more to him than to any other English- 
man. It was Walter Raleigh, rather than any other Eng- 
lishman, who first determined that the empire of this new 
world must fall into the hands of Protestant England rather 
than into the hands of Papal Spain. Above all, save 
America, — his Virginia as he wanted to call it, — save 
America for England and for the faith. To make that 
sure he spent his hopes, his treasure, and his blood; and 
would have willingly given all, had they been twenty times 
as rich. And he made that sure. It is not too much to 
say, as Dean Stanley once said, that Walter Raleigh is the 
father of the United States of America. 

Soldier, sailor, poet, orator, courtier, statesman, hero, 
— his life swept around the whole orbit of human endeavor 
and human achievement; and the record of it is a power 
and an inspiration still. With all his faults, he was a manly 
champion of that Christianity that had iron in its blood, 
and thought some things worth dying for: he is a goodly 
saint of the Protestant calendar. 

One famous group of men there was who shared 
largely in Raleigh's spirit, and who always had Raleigh's 
admiring friendship, and Sidney's too, so long as Sidney 
lived. Go back in your imagination, if you can, to the 
19th of July, 1588, and to the yard of the little seaward 
looking Pelican Inn at Plymouth. It is almost sundown, 
and, in the cool of the day, a group of men are just be- 
ginning a game of bowls. They are almost all Devonshire 
men, born in sight of blue water. There was Raleigh him- 
self, a look of anxiety on his face, perhaps, that July after- 
noon, — for there was cause, — but a look of command, too, 
we may be sure. "He did ever have," says old Aubrey, 
"an awfulness and ascendancy in his aspect over other 
mortals." Near Raleigh that afternoon, we know, was his 
old friend John Davis, who had paddled with him on the 
Dart when they were boys together. Since those days, 
John Davis had battled with wave and tempest and the 



AN OLD CASTLE 25 

worst dangers of hunger and mutiny in the unknown seas 
around the South Pole, in a voyage the story of which is 
stranger than any romance, and only the summer before 
he had struggled up through the icy strait that bears his 
name, in a leaky little cutter of thirty tons, till he got four 
degrees nearer the frozen pole than any ship had ever gone 
before. Hardy seaman, brave Christian man, was this 
Davis, with the quick imagination and the warm heart of a 
poet inside him, too, as his letters will show. 

Near him was a man who looks no poet, but a true sea- 
dog, 

long, and lank, and brown, 
As is the ribbed sea-sand. 

His leathern face has been tanned in the tropics and frozen 
at both poles. He is slow of speech, but he always remem- 
bers how, when he, who but a little while before was only a 
poor sailor lad, was about to sail away with a ship of his 
own, his glorious Queen deigned to come down to Greenwich 
where his good ship lay, to set her royal foot on board, to 
put her royal hand in his, and to say, "God speed you, 
Martin Frobisher." That was his reward; he asked no 
better. In the company that July afternoon was the com- 
mander of them all. Lord Howard of Effingham, Lord High 
Admiral of England; there, too, was the tall majestic form 
of Sir Richard Grenville, — the Spaniard's Terror, men 
called him. And there in the very center of the group was 
an old veteran of the seas, a very Ancient Mariner. You 
could hardly have told how old he was, for he had a sailor's 
stoop and a sliding gait, a rusty frowze of hair and a gen- 
eral look as if he had been salted and dried. That was old 
Sir John Hawkins, the man who made the English navy, 
and taught most of the men around him what they knew 
of seamanship. He had a deal of fight in him yet, as the 
Spaniards found before a week was over. And near Sir 
John, stood his favorite pupil, the last of the group and 
perhaps the most striking figure of them all — forty-one 
years old, short and stoutly built, a round head and a stiff 



26 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

frizzle of hair over it, gray eyes unusually long and narrow, 
through which he looked with a kind of squint, and a 
stubble of beard about mouth and chin. That was Sir 
Francis Drake, Vice-Admiral of the Fleet. The world knew 
who Drake was. It was seventeen years before, when he 
was only twenty-four years old, that he climbed the tree on 
the peak in Darien, and looking out thence with eager eyes 
got his first glimpse of the great Pacific, and resolved, God 
willing, to sail an English ship in those seas. Since then he 
had sailed an English ship in almost every sea under the 
whole heaven, and "singed the Spaniard's beard" in many a 
hot encounter. That afternoon in the yard of the Pelican 
Inn, he was just about to begin the game. He slowly bent 
forward, swung back his arm, and held the ball poised an 
instant before he should hurl it down the alley; when in 
that instant there rushed in a weather-beaten tar shouting 
to the Lord Admiral, "My Lord I My Lord! they're 
coomin' I they're coomin' I I saw 'em off the Lizard last 
night 1 They're coomin' full-sail, hundreds of 'em, 
a-darkenin the waters!" Drake stayed his uplifted hand 
a moment only, then sent the ball thundering down the 
planks, and coolly turning to the Admiral said, "There will 
be time to finish the game, m^^Lord, and then we'll go out 
and give the Dons a thrashing!" How sound a thrashing 
they gave the Dons of the Spanish Armada in the week 
that followed, every one knows. If the thrashing had gone 
the other way, you and I would not be living in a free 
Protestant land to-day. 

But wonderful as the victory over the Armada was, 
it seems to me one of the least of their exploits. The 
story of what those men dared in the last quarter of 
the sixteenth century thrills me as nothing else. Do you 
know anything like it? It is a nobler epic than Homer 
ever sang, a grander tale than that of Troy. Davis 
in his little pinnace at midnight steering through the tor- 
tuous strait of Magellan that no English keel had ever cut 
before; Drake stealing like a shadow up the west coast 
of South America, swooping down upon Spanish settle- 



AN OLD CASTLE 27 

ments, and then striking boldly out into the unknown 
Pacific to sail around the world; good Humphrey Gilbert 
exploring all the coast of North America in a cutter of ten 
tons burthen — ten tons, think of it! — there is no end to that 
story of heroism. These men were England's true knights, 
for it was not for mere gain or glory that they fought. 
At the bottom of all this romantic heroism, there was a 
profound religious sentiment. We shall never read aright 
that glorious page of history until we understand that 
singular combination of the ardor of religion and the ardor 
of ambition which, centuries before, hurried all Europe to 
the tomb of the Saviour, and now fired all England to 
a new crusade against the abominations of Rome and the 
cruelties of Spain. There was need. On the continent 
Protestantism was fighting a losing battle. With the 
triumph of the Guises, France was lost to the cause. The 
Netherlands were writhing under the armed heel of Philip. 
Priests of the new order of Jesus were skulking in every 
corner of England, darkly weaving no one knew what 
slimy webs of intrigue, carrying daggers meant for the heart 
of EKzabeth herself. What Rome could do the Eve of 
St. Bartholomew told. What Spain was doing every lad 
of a dozen years knew well enough. She had fixed her 
clutch upon the fairest portions of the New World; she 
was slaying its savages and gathering its gold. Every year 
her soldiery were butchering the inoffensive Indians by 
thousands; every year her treasure-fleet came home groan- 
ing under its load of ill-gotten gain. Nay, Englishmen 
needed not to look so far to see the work of Spain. Over 
the Channel in the Netherlands, under the very shadow of 
the English coast, Parma and his red-handed men were about 
their ghastly work. 

England was left alone as the champion of Prot- 
estantism. All the noblest men who made that history 
felt it to be so, accepted the commission as if it were 
divine. Spain was not only the foe of England : she was the 
foe of humanity, the foe of God. It was in this spirit that 
their noblest deeds were done. Read the story of it and 



2 8 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

see. On Hawkins' ship the record tells us, "we gathered 
together morning and evening to serve God." When Luke 
Fox's ship sails away, — I am quoting from Froude, — the 
crew agree: "ist. That all the company shall duly repair 
every day at the call of the bell to hear prayers, in a godly 
and devout manner as Christians ought. 2nd. That no man 
shall swear by the name of God, or use any profane oath." 
"The ice was strong," says one of Frobisher's men in telling 
the story of their liberation from the grip of the polar sea, 
"The ice was strong, but God was stronger !" When Hum- 
phrey Gilbert's ten-ton ship, hammered almost to pieces 
on the icy rocks of Labrador, was slowly going down in 
mid-ocean, the master, standing on deck, called to his com- 
panions, "Be of good cheer, men; we are as near heaven by 
sea, as by land." "A speech," says the old chronicler, "very 
well becoming a soldier resolute in Christ Jesus as I can 
testify he was." The morning after his game of bowls^ 
Drake, looking coolly out upon the Spanish sails that whit- 
ened all the Channel, wrote, "By the grace of God, if I live, 
I doubt not to handle the matter with this Duke of Sidonia 
as he shall wish himself at home among his orange trees; 
only God give us grace to depend upon Him." Sir Richard 
Grenville, after having for fifteen hours in his one ship, with 
only a hundred men, fought fifteen Spanish galleons, manned 
by ten thousand men, and after having sunk two of them, 
and disabled a half dozen more, his own ship riddled 
through and through and leaking at every seam, at last, shot 
three times through the body, lay down to die, with these 
words on his lips : "Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a 
joyful and a quiet mind, for that I have ended my life as a 
true soldier ought to do, that has fought for his country, his 
queen, his honour, and his religion." 

These men, and such as these, I call England's knights. 
Rough, hardy, adventurous, often mistaken, often sinning, 
they were yet honest Christian men. They thought them- 
selves fighting the battles of God : and for my part I believe 
they were right. Certainly in these tamer days it is inspir- 
ing to read the record of downright men who thought the 



AN OLD CASTLE 29 

truth worth fighting for and believed the devil something 
more than a metaphor. 

But time would fail me to tell of all the great names that 
will rise to your recollection as you lie on the grass in the 
old castle of Ludlow and dream of the days when the Sid- 
neys lived there. You will think of those writers in whose 
pages, after all, we may see the liveliest picture of that 
bygone time. You will think of that shy and retiring poet, 
Edmund Spenser, bosom friend of Sidney and of Raleigh, 
who, finding no place in the sterner struggles of that battling 
age for a temper so mild as his, yet feeling none the less 
at his heart the thrill of a poet's and a patriot's sympathy 
with it all, withdrew to his retirement in Ireland, and put 
all that was noblest in that age into the deathless verse 
of his great epic, the epic of England, the Faery Land, 
and of Elizabeth, the Faery Queen. 

Or you may, perhaps, for some moments imagine that 
you are in the London of Sidney and Raleigh, and that you 
have taken boat across the Thames on some sunny after- 
noon, and made your way by three of the clock to that curi- 
ous, tall, six-sided, wooden building just erected in Bankside 
over which a big red flag is flying. You go in at a door above 
which is an efligy of Atlas bearing his Globe — for this is the 
New Globe Theater; you stand upon the ground among a 
motley crowd, but you can see the rush-strewn stage well 
enough, with the gay young gallants who sit talking before 
the curtain. A trumpet somewhere blares three times: the 
curtain is drawn aside to show a bare stage with a big painted 
sign at the back marked Verona, and lo ! there comes Tybalt, 
and Mercutio, and Romeo, and at that odd little window in 
the background a boy in girl's apparel is speaking out the 
words of Juliet. And among the young fellows at the front 
of the stage, on the side, you may perhaps catch a glimpse 
of an eager face with a forehead so high and eyes so still 
that there is yet a look of quiet in it, — thinking perhaps 
of his Juliet whom he has left at Stratford-on-Avon, and of 
his fair twin girls. Anybody will tell you that this is 
the new playwright, Will Shakespeare, keen and masterful 



30 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

young fellow, who wrote the play you are watching and owns 
a good part of the theater you are in. But no one will tell 
you that this young man is the greatest writer this world 
has yet been able to produce, widest, wisest mind of his 
great age, and unmatched in all ages thus far. Posterity is 
just learning that to-day. 

Or in fancy, you will take a stroll at nightfall down the 
long street of the Strand, — pleasant green fields about you 
at Charing Cross where you start, pleasant fields all the 
way on your left, where now is the "multitudinous dust- 
whirl of great London," and on your right noble new palaces 
with broad gardens that run down to the grassy banks of 
the small, fair-flowing Thames. And just as you reach the 
City, and pass in under Temple Bar, looking for an inn, you 
shall see a snug one just at your right. On the creaking 
sign that hangs at the door St. Dunstan is pulling the Devil 
by the nose, for this is the Devil Tavern. It will pay you 
to go in. Quite likely you will find Raleigh here, likely 
enough Will Shakespeare too, and over the door of the 
inner room as you go in you see the beckoning invitation, 

Welcome all who lead or follow 
To the Oracle of Apollo. 

Yonder at the head of the board — nowhere else you 
may be sure — sits the master spirit here. Mountain belly 
and rocky face, tun of canary on legs, hard-headed old con- 
troversialist, obstinate as the east wind, and with an egotism 
that fairly rose into the regions of the sublime, — you 
wouldn't take him for a poet. But he was a poet, neverthe- 
less, and no mean philosopher beside. Not a very great 
man, perhaps, this Ben Jonson, but certainly a very big 
one. He carried about a deal of hard common sense, and 
he could use it on occasion. It would have been wise to 
agree with him, for like his namesake of one hundred and 
fifty years later, old Sam Johnson, he was a hard hitter in 
argument, and if his pistol missed fire, he would knock you 
down with the butt end of it. But there was somewhere 
inside that great hulking body of his a spark of pure Prome- 



AN OLD CASTLE 31 

thean fire, and now and then there broke from him some ray 
of poetry, keen and clear, and fair of rosy hue, that shines 
like a diamond through the centuries. He had a gay and 
airy fancy such as no other singer of his day could equal — 
Ben Jonson was Sam Johnson plus Puck. But he was 
among the last of the Elizabethans, and his name carries 
us out of that great age of the Sidneys in which your 
thoughts have dwelt for a little time. 

But before the afternoon sun sinks behind the broken 
rim of the castle wall and the old warden limps in to tell 
you it is time to go, there is one other scene ever memorable 
in these walls that your memory will repaint. It was in 
1634. Sidney had been in his soldier's grave for almost 
fifty years, and the little band of idealists who had inspired 
England with high ideals of gentle life and reproduced for 
a little time all that was noblest in the olden chivalry, 
broken first by Sidney's fall, had dropped one by one away. 
Spenser, the poet, chased from his burning home in Ireland, 
had died alone in an inn of King Street, Westminster; 
Raleigh, the hero, fallen on evil days, had gone to his dun- 
geon and thence to his scaffold; and Elizabeth herself, the 
center of all this romantic devotion, had grown old, and 
crazed, and despairing, and died: upon her throne sat that 
learned dunce, that misbegotten pedant whose mother was a 
fiend and whose father was a fool, and who had less poetry 
in his obstinate, and conceited, and canting soul than the 
straitest Puritan in his realm. And after some years of 
boasting inefficiency, this James had gone the way of all 
kings and his son, Charles, reigned in his stead, — poor easy 
Charles, of gentle manners, voluptuous tastes, tyrannical 
principles, and elastic conscience. The Elizabethan days 
were over. The dream had passed, the glamour faded 
quite away. Money-getting, trade, sciences, philosophy, 
much jangle of controversy, — all this in abundance, but the 
great age was by. Provincial Ludlow in those days was no 
better than the rest of England, — quite likely worse, if we 
may judge from what a lean, sallow-faced, crop-haired 
Shropshire servant boy of sixteen who lived here for a year 



32 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

or so then reported of it. Richard Baxter used to say in 
after life that he had learned nothing good as a boy at 
Ludlow, and that had he stayed there much longer he 
should have forgotten all the teachings of his pious 
father. 

It was, then, in this later and lower time on Michaelmas 
evening of 1634, that this old castle of Ludlow blazed with 
unusual festivities. For a new President of the Welsh 
Marches, and the last one, had come to take up his official 
residence here, — the Earl of Bridgewater, no unworthy suc- 
cessor of the Sidneys. In his family were preserved the 
traditions of a nobler age. His father was the great Chan- 
cellor Ellesmere; his mother-in-law — who was oddly his 
stepmother too — was Alice Spencer of Althorp, the rela- 
tive and friend of our great poet, and besung in her girl- 
hood by him in one of his best poems, and by a host of 
other lesser singers of the Elizabethan time. This Earl of 
Bridgewater is now a grave man of fifty-four, and he has 
brought with him to Ludlow his two black-haired boys of 
eleven and twelve, and his pretty daughter Alice, a year 
or so older. It is then to welcome this Earl and his family 
that the old castle has put on its gayety to-night. It is evi- 
dent that something of special brilliancy is preparing in 
the great hall. 

As you lie on the grassy turf which is now its only 
floor, it is easy to imagine that scene of more than 
two hundred and fifty years ago. On one side of the hall, 
in the great fireplace there, a ruddy fire is glowing and 
crackling, and in spite of all the tapers, casting flickering 
lights across upon the three, long, narrow lancet windows 
opposite. Between the two doors at the south end, a stage 
has been set up, and behind the curtain you hear the notes of 
the musicians tuning their instruments. In through the door 
at the lower left hand comes streaming the company. Now 
they are in their seats; there is a rustle, a murmur, a tinkle 
of the bell, a hush, the stage is darkened to show it is night, 
and the curtain is drawn aside discovering a wild wood; and 
"swift as the sparkle of a glancing star," to soft music, 



AN OLD CASTLE 33 

glides in a tall, slight young man, habited as a spirit, and 
as the music pauses you catch his opening words : 

Before the starry threshold of Jove's court 

My mansion is, where those immortal shapes 

Of bright, aerial Spirits live insphered 

In regions mild of calm and serene air, 

Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot 

Which men call Earth, and, with low-thoughted care, 

Confined, and pestered in this pinfold here, 

Strive to keep up a frail and feverish being, 

Unmindful of the crown that Virtue gives. 

This young man is Mr. Lawes, the well-known musician of 
London, who has arranged the music and scenery for this 
masque ; and the words he is speaking were written for the 
occasion by a young friend of his not much known yet, but 
likely in the judgment of some to be heard of by and by, — 
the ingenious young Mr. John Milton, recently student of 
Christ's College, Cambridge. Mr. Milton has written some 
verses, but never dared to print any as yet, and he has never 
before had so large a circle of hearers as this evening at 
Ludlow Castle. 

When you and I read that masque of Comus, how 
it all seems to come back to us as if we had ourselves 
seen it: the great hall with its deep-embayed windows, 
arched roof, and tapestry-hung walls; this bright company, 
the two black-eyed boys of the Earl as the two brothers 
and pretty Alice Egerton as the lady of the masque, speak- 
ing out with soft and solemn-breathing sound those lines 
of matchless poetry. And if the company that night had 
ears to hear, what must they have thought of Mr. Milton's 
masque of Comus. Nothing like it had been heard in 
England since the voice of Shakespeare grew silent twenty 
years before; nothing so beautiful has ever been heard in 
England since. It was one more strain of the old Eliza- 
bethan music, high, and clear, and pure, and more sedately 
sweet. Something of the old passionate ardor is gone, per- 
haps, but it is still the tremulous sensitiveness to beauty, 
the high imagination, the knightly love of truth, of a 



34 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Spenser and a Sidney that lives in these lines, — lines so 
perfect that they shine aloft like stars forever, high, still, 
serene. It was fitting that this, Milton's best poem, should 
first have been heard in the hall of the Sidneys. For it 
was the last note of that elder music. No one but Milton 
knew the secret of that strain, and even he soon lost the 
mastery of it. When next he sang, there was a jarring 
note of discord in his song, a distant sound of coming strife. 
In Comus the young Milton pleads with the fire of a 
Raleigh and the imagination of a Spenser for the union of 
all that is good with all that is fair. But it was too late. 
Much of the high devotion to truth and duty lived on, 
indeed, but too often united with narrowness of sympathy 
and dimness of vision. The stern logic of events seemed 
effecting a divorce between the ethical and the aesthetical 
elements of English character; the poets lost their purity, 
and the Puritans lost their poetry. Englishmen were taking 
sides in a long and bitter quarrel, in which victory for 
either side could not be an unmixed good. It was no longer 
the large, united, heroic Elizabethan England of the Faery 
Queen. The light that never was on sea or land was be- 
clouded by the smoke of battle, and then faded into common 
day. 

It is then with this last strain of the elder music in our 
ears that we may well go out at sundown from the walls 
of the old castle. As we pass again through the high- 
arched gate, under the grinning teeth of the rusty portcullis, 
we shall hardly care to remember that in that little room 
over the gate, thirty years later when the Puritan cause 
had been won and lost again, a witty satirist sat down to 
write a poem of rattling doggerel that should turn the 
ridicule of a dissolute age against a fallen cause, and wake 
wild laughter in the throats of fools. We shall hardly care 
to remember that Samuel Butler's Hudihras was written to 
mock the cause for which Milton fought, within the very 
walls where Sidney dwelt. So rather, as we go down the 
hill to our inn, and turn to get a last look at the old castle 
in the long lingering English twilight, and still feel the 



AN OLD CASTLE 35 

vague sense of sympathy for all the varying pathos of 
human hope, and ambition, and glory gone and crumbled 
like its crumbling walls; for the story ever old of human 
life, how young and bright soever, passing too soon to 
death and dull oblivion; we will couple with our last look 
the closing lines of that last and noblest poem ever heard 
within the walls of Ludlow, words which sum up the les- 
sons we may read In all that part of the past which is 
really immortal : 

Heaven hath timely tried their youth, 
Their faith, their patience, and their truth, 
And sent them here through hard assays 
With a crown of deathless praise. 

Mortals, that would follow me, 
Love Virtue, she alone is free; 
She can teach ye how to climb 
Higher than the spheary chime: 
Or, if Virtue feeble were. 
Heaven itself would stoop to her. 



AS YOU LIKE IT 

WHEN, about 1598, Shakespeare had finished that 
great cycle of historical dramas which culminated 
in the Henry IV and the Henry V, he betook 
himself for a time exclusively to comedy. For three or 
four years he seems to have written nothing else. Why 
this was we cannot now tell. It may possibly have been 
because comedy was wanted by the theatrical company for 
which he was writing, or for some other such purely ex- 
ternal reason. But one naturally prefers to think that after 
the stress of passionate feeling and heroic action which for 
some five years he had been depicting in his great histories 
and his early tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, he craved variety 
and relief and gladly turned to the more lightsome side of 
human experience and the more playful and humorous 
phases of character. Two comedies, indeed, had probably 
been written during the years in which he was finishing the 
Henry IV and the Henry V ; but these two comedies — 
The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Taming of the 
Shrew — seem to lie upon one side of the main course of 
Shakespeare's work. He certainly did not put the best of 
himself into them. It is as if he turned them off rapidly, 
perhaps to meet some incidental demand, while his thought 
and interest were mainly given to other work. The Taming 
of the Shrew, all the critics, I think, now agree, is only in 
part Shakespeare's work, being probably an old play hur- 
riedly patched up by him, and then enlarged at a later day 
by some other hand. And The Merry Wives, though it is 
Shakespeare's throughout, must, it seems to me, have been 
written at the suggestion of some unwise admirer of Fal- 
staff who thought it would be vastly diverting to see the fat 
knight in love. But one could wish that Shakespeare had 
declined to listen to any such suggestion, even though it 

36 



AS YOU LIKE IT 37 

came, as tradition asserts, from Elizabeth herself; for 
Falstaff in The Merry Wives is certainly translated worse 
than Bottom ever was. Only Sir Hugh and Slender and 
Mistress Anne, they are delightful and in the true Shake- 
spearian manner. 

But when Shakespeare had well finished the histories and 
was at liberty to turn all his energies into comedy, he wrote 
those three most delightful plays, the Much Ado About 
Nothing, the Twelfth Night, the As You Like It. I take 
it these are the best examples of Shakespeare's pure comedy. 
It is true that he had already begun in the historical plays 
to unite tragic and comic elements, and some of his later 
works, like The Winter's Tale, combine the characteristics 
of comedy and tragedy in proportions so nearly equal that 
they cannot with any propriety be called by either name, 
but are best termed romances. But in these three plays, 
especially in Twelfth Night and As You Like It, we have 
pure comedy in its most typical Shakespearian form. 

For comedy, in Shakespeare, never aims merely or 
primarily at the ludicrous. It is not broad or farcical. It 
admits little mere buffoonery and little grotesque incident. 
It makes you smile inwardly, but not laugh aloud. Even 
in his very earliest plays, the effect of comedy is gained 
not by exhibiting caricature or oddity of character or by 
farcical incident, but rather by showing us affectations such 
as we all put on occasionally, sentiments passing into pretty 
forms of sentimentality, the varying play of moods, the 
sprightly sallies of wit, and the droll self-importance of 
stupidity. In these more mature comedies we have a wider 
experience and so quicker perception and deeper enjoyment 
of all the humorous phases of life, while there is still less 
of mere incident or eccentricity. Plays like Twelfth Night 
and As You Like It are not comedies of laughter, but 
comedies of gladness. They are the poetry of health, of 
cheerfulness, of vigor. They seem to me the best expression 
we have in literature of the full joyousness of living. They 
awaken in us those thoughts, emotions, and sentiments, that 
most minister to a refined and healthful happiness, and 



38 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

they portray In others with charming humor but without 
any bitterness those peculiar and humorous phases of char- 
acter that make up so large a part of the innocent pleasures 
of observation. Take, for instance, two such characters as 
Rosalind and Jaques in the play before us. What a refresh- 
ment in the mere presence of Rosalind ! She is like a spring 
morning; she makes all life seem new and gladsome to us, 
and we hardly know how. And Jaques, — or Jac-ques as 
I suppose we must call him since Shakespeare does, — what 
an immense deal of quiet enjoyment one can get out of him. 
There is nothing boldly pronounced in the depiction of his 
character, but what a peculiar and subtly humorous in- 
dividuality it is ! Yet neither of these characters ministers 
directly to our sense of the ludicrous ; they 'tickle us about 
the heart root,' as Chaucer says somewhere, but they do not 
tempt us much to laughter. 

In such comedy as this love will of course usually furnish 
the motive upon which the action turns, since without love 
a life of exquisite gladness is hardly conceivable. It is 
under the influence of the gentle passion in some of its mani- 
fold phases that all the charms and graces of character 
blossom out most freely. And we must admit, too, that it 
also warms into humorous activity all the pleasant affecta- 
tions and whimsicalities; as an old writer would say, it doth 
greatly breed humors. Think what a various company 
of lovers we have in these three plays, — Rosalind, bright, 
witty; Orlando, modest yet poetical; the Duke of Twelfth 
Night, sentimental and dreamy — in love with being in love ; 
Viola, gentle, tender, and wise; Beatrice, with that tart 
tongue of hers that, we are sure, made life racy for Benedick 
the rest of his days; Malvolio, the inimitable, who never felt 
his own worth till his lady seemed to shine upon it; Touch- 
stone, who is so determined not to be blinded by any illu- 
sions of beauty that he deliberately chooses the ugliest 
rustic lass he can find, — this is not half the list. And in all 
it is love that sets in motion whatever in them is most 
graceful and humorous. The comedy must end happily: 
but in the course of that true love which we shall not expect 



AS YOU LIKE IT 39 

always to run smoothly, there will be abundant opportunity 
to show some touches of that pathos of self-denial and quiet 
suffering which lends a moral charm to our comedy and 
proves its love to be strong as well as sweet. When we have 
love and all the pretty humors born of love, we must have 
poetry and music; we shall find in these plays some of 
Shakespeare's most luxuriant description and his most de- 
licious imagery, while the songs scattered through them are 
the most dainty and tuneful he ever wrote : 

It was a lover and his lass, 

With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino, 

That o'er the green corn-field did pass 

In the spring tinie, the only pretty ring time, 

When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding; 

Sweet lovers love the spring. 

But these comedies are not, like A Midsummer Night's 
Dream, an exercise in airy and sportive fancy, a revel in 
all forms of the beautiful for its own sake. Shakespeare 
came to their composition when he was just reaching the 
prime of his early manhood. The experience of ten years 
had not been lost upon him. The plays impress us at once 
as much wiser than his early comedies. There is a pene- 
tration and thoughtfulness in them that we do not see in 
The Two Gentlemen of Verona or A Midsummer Night's 
Dream. The charm of the principal characters, like Rosa- 
lind and Beatrice, is largely an intellectual one. The plays 
are full of the most pithy and sententious observations. If 
they have not that ripeness, that almost over-fulness of 
meaning and of feeling that one finds in the latest plays, 
they clearly mark a period when Shakespeare's intellectual 
powers were in their prime — he was about thirty-eight, you 
remember — and his life, not yet brought under the shadow 
of any great sorrow or any great doubt still felt the buoyant 
joyousness of youth. 

Of the three comedies most would, I think, select as 
the best either the Twelfth Night or the As You Like It, but 
as between these two I suspect there would be much differ- 
ence of opinion. One likes best the one he has read last; on 



40 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

which ground I am now inclined to prefer the As You Like 
It. But whether the As You Like It be the best of Shakes- 
peare's comedies or not, I am quite sure that it is the most 
typical, the purest example of that kind of comedy which 
Shakespeare preferred. There is certainly less variety in it 
and less contrast than in the Twelfth Night. There is no 
loud mirth in it like that of Aguecheek and Sir Toby, no 
broadly ridiculous affectations like those of Malvolio, no 
such intensity of feeling as sometimes seems to suffuse for a 
moment the gracious talk of Viola. It seems as if Shake- 
speare would not venture to disturb the romantic charm of 
this play of As You Like It by admitting to it any broad 
humor whatever; and while he made it serious as well as 
gladsome, he would allow no strain of real sadness to invade 
its music. In As You Like It everything is airy, refined, ro- 
mantic. And I have always thought in the name he gave 
it Shakespeare meant to indicate, among other things, his 
confidence that this time, at least, we must like his work. 

We know where he found the plot of the play so far as 
it has any plot. Among that half score of young fellows 
who in the decade between 1580 and 1590 managed to com- 
bine the parts of scholar, adventurer, and poet was one 
Thomas Lodge. He began as a writer of rather over- 
pretty lyrics, tried some dramas not very successfully, and 
after a wild and roving youth, gave up literature and sobered 
himself into a physician. His most fortunate literary at- 
tempts were long pastoral romances, a kind of fiction then 
much in vogue, of which Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia is the 
best known example. The rough and boisterous spirits of 
the day seemed to delight in imaginations of a delicious 
sylvan country where all impossible beauties were heaped in 
endless profusion. Of Lodge's romances the best is one he 
wrote on shipboard, while voyaging in the tropics for glory 
and booty under one Captain Clarke. "To beguile the 
time with labor," says he, "I writ this book; rough as 
hatched in the storms of the ocean and feathered in the 
surges of many perilous seas, . . . when every line was wet 
with a surge, and every humorous passion counterchecked 



AS YOU LIKE IT 41 

with a storm." This romance of Rosalynde, printed in 
1590, is the book in which Shakespeare found the whole 
plot of As You Like It. The forest, the banished duke, 
the banished brother, and the banished maiden who mas- 
querades in male attire with the faithful cousin who shares 
her exile, the old servant Adam, the lover who carves his 
verses on the trees, — all these, with other minor incidents, 
Shakespeare found ready to his hand in Lodge's book. From 
Lodge's book, too, he may have gained besides the plot and 
the names of his personages some faint suggestion of that 
exquisite pastoral atmosphere so delightful in his play; 
but he could hardly have got anything more than that. 
The characters of his play are entirely of his own creation, 
and for three of them, Jaques, Touchstone, and Audrey, he 
found no hint in the romance of Lodge, or anywhere else, so 
far as we know. And it need hardly be said the felicities of 
diction, the wealth of wisdom, wit, and imagination in the 
play are entirely his own. 

The central purpose in the plot of the play is to select 
a company of people of characteristics sufficiently varied to 
produce pleasing dramatic contrasts, and then to place these 
people in such circumstances as shall remove at once the 
restraints and conventions of an artificial society and leave 
each one free to follow the impulses of his nature. These 
lords and ladies are placed in the sunny glades of the forest 
of Arden and left to do as they like. The object of the 
poet is not, primarily, to contrast the artificial life of courts 
with the natural life of the country, — it isn't a pretty ob- 
ject-lesson in Rousseau, — for the banished duke, and Or- 
lando, and the ladies all carry with them into the forest 
characters that have been formed under the pressure of 
active life and have known care and sorrow. Still less did 
Shakespeare have any purpose to show that ministry of 
nature to uplift and purify human thought of which in more 
recent poetry we have, perhaps, heard quite enough, — that 
is a modern Wordsworthian notion. No, Shakespeare's 
purpose was simply to give us a picture of life in such idyllic 
surroundings as we all dream of, but never find. It would 



42 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

be something, we often think, to be well out of Mrs. 
Grundy's neighborhood, to begin with. It is much more to 
be released from the constant stress and urgency, to be out 
of the care and fret, the dull routine that makes life not 
only toilsome but prosaic. We never quite get rid of a 
primitive sylvan impulse : it is this that makes pastoral 
and idyllic poetry always; it is some vague and groping 
form of this desire that will lead half of us in the next two 
months to abandon the comforts of civilization and brave 
the terrors of country board, or lead some — wiser and more 
fortunate — into the solitudes of the Maine woods or the 
Adirondacks. Yet we do not really wish to forego the graces 
of intellect and manners. If we think we can surrender some 
of the comforts, we cannot give up the amenities of life. 
Our ideal pastoral country must not lie in the land of the 
Philistines. The wit and wisdom, the brilliant converse, 
the beauty and graces, of society, along with the freedom, 
the freshness, and joyance of nature, — where shall we find 
that combination? Where? Why in the Forest of Arden. 
In these cool woodland spaces, where the interlacing shad- 
ows dance upon the dewy ground, and the deer come down 
to the brawling brooks to drink, here is a little company 
of people who have brought hither all the urbanity that 
courts can teach and all the sober thoughtfulness tjhat 
long and varied experience can give, but who find here the 
burden of convention and artificiality lifted off at once, so 
that all natural impulses can blossom out without restraint, 
and they can "fleet the time carelessly as they did in the 
golden world." When you and I try to picture life as we 
should like it, doesn't the forest of Arden come oftenest to 
our thought? 

Under the greenwood tree 
Who loves to lie with me, 
And tune his merry note 
Unto the sweet bird's throat, 
Come hither, come hither, come hither! 
Here shall he see 
No enemy 
But winter and rough weather. 



AS YOU LIKE IT 43 

There's not much action in the play — as, indeed, why should 
there be? There is nothing to be done in the forest of 
Arden. That is the charm of it ; here feel we not the penalty 
of Adam. Yet there is no monotony or dull inaction, for 
the play sparkles with wit and life from beginning to end. 
The interest, therefore, arises mostly from what is said, and 
from a kind of sprightly and gladsome feeling that seems to 
pervade the play, without coming into expression much more 
prominently at any one point than another. 

The first act serves for little more than to get Orlando 
and Rosalind in love with each other, and to get all the 
people fairly started for the forest. At the opening of the 
play, you remember, the usurping Duke, Frederick, has al- 
ready driven his elder brother, the real Duke, into exile. 
Rosalind, the daughter of this banished Duke, however, 
still remains with her cousin Celia at the court of her usurp- 
ing uncle, until Frederick, getting to dislike her as a con- 
stant reminder of his injustice to her father, commands her 
also to leave the court, and she goes, with her cousin Celia 
and the court fool, Touchstone, to the forest of Arden, 
whither her father has preceded her. The other bad man of 
the play, Oliver, is of the same unfraternal temper, with- 
holds from his younger brother, Orlando, the share of the 
paternal estate due him, treats him with studied rudeness, 
and soon manages to inveigle him into a match with Duke 
Frederick's wrestler, which he thinks will be the death of 
him. But Orlando throws the vaunting wrestler, at the 
same time catching the fancy of Rosalind, who is looking on. 
And a little later, learning that his brother is plotting 
against him, he, too, with the trusty servant, Adam, goes 
out to complete the company of exiles in the forest of 
Arden. Shakespeare is not careful to portray very clearly 
the characters of these two men who are so hard-hearted 
toward their brothers, because he wishes to concentrate our 
attention upon the group in the forest. He is, however, 
concerned to give us at least a glimpse of the real character 
of Oliver, since he is to introduce him again, in the last part 
of the play, you remember, as the lover of Celia. We are 



44 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

made to see, therefore, just what is the motive of Oliver's 
hatred for Orlando. Oliver is naturally haughty, reserved, 
and so unpopular. Nobody likes him, and nobody gives 
him credit even for what good there is in him. And so, as 
often happens with such men, his unpopularity changes his 
reserve into moroseness and suspicion. His brother, Or- 
lando, on the contrary, is open, affable, and sunny- 
tempered, wins golden opinions from all sorts of 
people. It is almost inevitable that Oliver should envy 
Orlando, and natural that he should envy him all the more 
because Orlando accepts his envy with quiet indifference 
which seems to imply a conscious superiority. Oliver lets 
out the real cause of his hatred in a bit of soliloquy, after 
he has been plotting with the wrestler to get rid of his 
brother : 

I hope I shall see an end of him; for my soul, yet I know not 
why, hates nothing more than he. Yet he's gentle; never school'd, 
and yet learned; full of noble device; of all sorts enchantingly 
beloved; and indeed so much in the heart of the world, and espe- 
cially of my own people, who best know him, that I am altogether 
misprised. 

Envy like this will never be broken by resentment or in- 
difference, but you will observe what a fine touch of truth 
and nature it is that this brother when, in the last act, he is 
given a sudden and overwhelming proof of the wronged 
Orlando's forgiving temper should melt down at once, and 
take his brother to his heart. Still more true is the poetic 
judgment that makes this mistrustful and jealous-tempered 
man, when first in his life he feels the power of one gen- 
erous love, open his heart to another, and find a fascination 
in the straightforward, practical Celia. 

Dr. Johnson, in his few words of comment on this play, 
says with a rather ponderous attempt at archness of man- 
ner, "I know not how the ladies will approve the facility 
with which Rosalind and Celia give away their hearts," 
Shakespeare by his practice in many of his plays manifestly 
leans towards the opinion he makes Phoebe quote from 
Marlowe, 



AS YOU LIKE IT 45 

Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight? 

Divers philosophers, I believe, have held the same view, — 
as for instance Coleridge, who, however, never did love. 
But some things can be said in explanation of Rosalind's 
precipitancy. Not only is Orlando as proper a young man 
as you will find on a summer's day, modest, open, and noble, 
but his situation when first Rosalind sees him is such as to 
appeal strongly to her sympathy, — a manly and winning 
young fellow, without funds, about to be knocked in the 
head by a prize-fighter. Her own misfortunes give her a 
sudden sense of kinship with him. But I take it that nothing 
will change pity into that love to which it is said to be 
akin so quickly as the conviction that as pity it is no longer 
called for. When the young Orlando sets the broken music 
in the sides of the bonny priser of the Duke and proves 
himself as stout as he is gentle, we see that Rosalind is won. 
The matter of fact Celia steps forward at once to con- 
gratulate him : 

Sir, you have well deserv'd. 
If you do keep your promises in love 
But justly, as you have exceeded all promise, 
Your mistress shall be happy. 

Ros. Gentleman, 

[Givinff him a chain from her neck.^ 
Wear this for me, one out of suits with fortune, 
That could give more, but that her hand lacks means. 
Shall we go, coz? 

Cel. Ay. Fare you well, fair gentleman. 

But you will notice that it is Rosalind that turns back for a 
last word. Orlando, as they go out, rebukes himself for 
his awkward bashfulness: 

Can I not say, I thank you? My better parts 
Are all thrown down, and that which here stands up 
Is but a quintain, a mere lifeless block. 

He is speaking to himself. Rosalind knows it, but glad of 
any pretext to turn back an instant, she says with a blush : 



46 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

He calls us back. My pride fell with my fortunes; 
I'll ask him what he would. Did you call, sir? 
Sir, you have wrestled well, and overthrown 
More than your enemies. 

Cel. Will you go, coz? 

Ros. Have with you. Fare you well. 

That moment's hesitation between her modesty and the 
frank impulse of admiration is a revelation. Shakespeare 
would give us a glimpse into the true woman's heart of 
Rosalind which we shall not forget. In the forest of 
Arden we are to see her in doublet and hose, with a wit as 
nimble as Atalanta's heels, but we are to understand at the 
outset that her character is not at bottom frivolous or flip- 
pant, but sound, serious, and womanly. She is too healthy 
for moodiness or melancholy, but the bits of dialogue In the 
First Act, show us that, though she bears It cheerfully, she 
still feels the heavy lot that has left her almost friendless 
on the bounty of the man who has banished her father. 
In the pretty bit of confidence with Celia just before she 
Is exiled, her bright humor Is mixed with some sense of 
weariness and anxiety like April sunshine and cloud: 

Cel. Why, cousin! why, Rosalind! Cupid have mercy! not a 
word? 

Ros. Not one to throw at a dog. 

Cel. No, thy words are too precious to be cast away upon curs ; 
throw some of them at me. Come, lame me with reasons. 

Ros. Then there were two cousins laid up, when the one 
should be lam'd with reasons and the other mad without any. 

Cel. But is all this for your father? 

Ros. No, some of it is for my child's father. O, how full of 
briers is this working-day world ! 

Cel. They are but burs, cousin, thrown upon thee in holiday 
foolery. If we walk not in the trodden paths, our very petticoats 
will catch them. 

Ros. I could shake them ofF my coat. These burs are in my 
heart. 

Cel. Hem them away. 

Ros. I would try, if I could hem and have him. 

Cel. Come, come, wrestle with thy affections. 

Ros. O, they take the part of a better wrestler than myself! 

Cel. . . . But, turning these jests out of service, let us talk in 



AS YOU LIKE IT 47 

good earnest. Is it possible, on such a sudden you should fall into 
so strong a liking with old Sir Roland's youngest son ? 

Ros. The Duke my father lov'd his father dearly. 

Cel. Doth it therefore ensue that you should love his son 
dearly? By this kind of chase, I should hate him, for my father 
hated his father dearly; yet I hate not Orlando. 

Ros. No, faith, hate him not, for my sake. 

And you will remember what the usurping Duke says of her 
to Celia when he is trying to excuse his own harshness : 

She is too subtle for thee; and her smoothness, 
Her very silence, and her patience 
Speak to the people, and they pity her. 

When we meet her in the forest masquerading like a pert 
and saucy lacquey, and playing the knave with Orlando, we 
shall know that in truth she has no doublet and hose in her 
disposition. 

But it is time that we should go to the forest. The 
banished Duke is the first person we meet there : 

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile, 
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet 
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods 
More free from peril than the envious court? 
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam, 
The seasons' difference, as the icy fang 
And churlish chiding of the winter's wind, 
Which, when it bites and blows upon my body, 
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say, 
"This is no flattery: these are counsellors 
That feelingly persuade me what I am." 
Sweet are the uses of adversity. 
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous. 
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head ; 
And this our life, exempt from public haunt, 
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks. 
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing. 

Of this good Duke we see but little, these lines being nearly 
half of all he utters during the play, yet we feel we know 
him very well. This man has tried life in all its phases, and 



48 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

found it all a discipline of virtue. It is because he has 
schooled his soul to faith and charity, has 

with holy bell been knoll'd to church, 
And sat at good men's feasts, and wip'd [his] eyes 
Of drops that sacred pity hath engend'red, 

that he can find the woodland life so calm and so full of 
food for kindly thoughts. Though deposed and banished 
there is nothing sour or gloomy in his temper, and glimpses 
of genial humor and poetry of spirit remind us that he is 
the father of Rosalind. "I met the Duke yesterday," 
says Rosalind, who has not yet discovered herself to her 
father. "I met the Duke and had much question with him. 
He asked me of what parentage I was. I told him, 
of as good as he; so he laugh'd and let me go." And 
I think it is pleasant that his most constant companion 
is the light-tempered Amiens who sings the charming 
songs. 

But by far the most interesting person in the Duke's little 
company is Jaques. What an original, juicy character he 
is! A man whom it is rather hard to analyze — real men 
usually are — but who always piques your curiosity and whom 
you remember like an old acquaintance. Jaques, I take it, 
is a curious compound of a cynic and a sentimentalist. He 
is old, — "the old gentleman," says Phebe, — and the Duke 
says he has been too free a liver. But the Duke is always 
a little hard upon him, and we need not conclude that Jaques 
had sunk himself in any very debasing vices. But he has led 
an aimless life of adventure, seeking pleasure in all forms; 
and he has found, of course, that pleasure sought for too 
eagerly soon palls. Unlike all the rest of the company he 
has never known any central purpose or made life a serious 
thing; and so unlike all the rest he finds no exhilaration in 
this free woodland leisure. He has traveled from Dan to 
Beersheba and found it all barren. Jaques is blase. "It is 
a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples 
. . . ; and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in 
which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous 



AS YOU LIKE IT 49 

sadness." Having now got beyond the relish of most pleas- 
ures himself, he finds a perverse comfort in exposing the 
vanity of pleasure in others. Yet there is no moral sound- 
ness in his rebukes; nothing but the languid satiety of the 
man who assures you with superiority that he has been 
through all that. To preach vanitas vanitatum never con- 
verted anybody yet, I suppose ; and most such preachers have 
a kind of lingering fondness for the experiences they exhort 
you to avoid, and take a seductive pleasure in the melancholy 
retrospect. That was the case with Jaques: and that 
was the reason why the sound-hearted Duke, as you remem- 
ber, thinks he had better not set up for a reformer: 

Duke. Fie on thee! I can tell what thou wouldst do. 
Jaq. What, for a counter, would I do, but good ? 
Duke. Most mischievous foul sin, in chiding sin. 

But though Jaques is something of a cynic, he is more of 
a sentimentalist. Your healthy man puts his sentiments at 
once into practice without stopping to think about them; 
emotions with him are motives as they ought to be; but 
your sentimentalist collects beautiful sentiments like a con- 
noisseur to gloat over them and invites his emotions merely 
for the luxury of feeling them. And this seems to me exactly 
the case with Jaques. He loves to titillate his sensibilities, 
and to taste the delicacy of a new emotion. You remember 
the graceful pathos of one of his moody reveries : 

as he lay along 
Under an oak whose antique root peeps out 
Upon the brook that brawls along this wood ; 
To the which place a poor sequest'red stag. 
That from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt, 
Did come to languish ; and, indeed, my lord, 
The wretched animal heav'd forth such groans, 
That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat 
Almost to bursting, and the big round tears 
Cours'd one another down his innocent nose 
In piteous chase; and thus the hairy fool, 
Much marked of the melancholy Jaques, 



^o AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Stood on the extremest verge of the swift brook, 
Augmenting it with tears. 

Duke S. But what said Jaques? 

Did he not moralize this spectacle? 
■ 1ST Lord. O, yes, into a thousand similes, 

weeping and commenting on the sobbing deer. But his 
appetite has become so jaded that it takes something of 
piquant flavor to stir it. Sound healthy men bore him. That 
accounts for his aversion to the Duke. The Duke "hath 
been all this day to look you," says Amiens; whereupon 
Jaques, "And I have been all this day to avoid him. He is 
too disputable for my company. I think of as many matters 
as he ; but I give heaven thanks, and make no boast of them." 
For Orlando he has a kind of humorous pity, since Orlando 
is "green and happy in first love, and thankful for illusion." 
Once only he finds a specimen that is a genuine novelty in 
human nature. After he has met Touchstone, he enters 
fairly quivering with delight: 

A fool, a fool! I met a fool i' the forest, 

A motley fool. A miserable world! 

As I do live by food, I met a fool; 

Who laid him down and basic'd him in the sun, 

And rail'd on Lady Fortune in good terms, 

In good set terms, and yet a motley fool. 

"Good morrow, fool," quoth I. "No, sir," quoth he, 

"Call me not fool till heaven hath sent me fortune." 

And then he drew a dial from his poke, 

And, looking on it with lack-lustre eye, 

Says very wisely, "It is ten o'clock. 

Thus we may see," quoth he, "how the world wags. 

'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine; 

And after one hour more 't will be eleven ; 

And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe. 

And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot ; 

And thereby hangs a tale." When I did hear 

The motley fool thus moral on the time, 

My lungs began to crow like chanticleer. 

That fools should be so deep-contemplative; 

And I did laugh sans intermission 

An hour by this dial. O noble fool! 

A worthy fool ! Motley's the only wear. 



AS YOU LIKE IT 51 

Duke S. What fool is this? 

Jaq. O worthy fool! One that hath been a courtier, 
And says, if ladies be but young and fair, 
They have the gift to know it; and in his brain, 
Which is as dry as the remainder biscuit 
After a voyage, he hath strange places cramm'd 
With observation, the which he vents 
In mangled forms. O that I were a fool ! 
I am ambitious for a motley coat. 

Such a man as Jaques makes a poor friend, for your 
thorough-going sentimentalist is the most selfish of mortals, 
— he couldn't afford to keep so many beautiful sentiments if 
he felt obliged to act upon them. But though a poor friend, 
he may make a very agreeable companion. Jaques cer- 
tainly is. His melancholy casts no gloom on any one, for 
it is evident that it is only a humorous sadness which he him- 
self vastly enjoys. He has naturally exquisite tastes, and 
he has never done anything but cultivate them. He loves 
music, though he "can suck melancholy out of a song, as a 
weasle sucks eggs," and, when he is in his moods, there is a 
vein of quaint humor in him infinitely diverting. As the 
Duke says, he is "very full of matter." When the play 
closes he drifts away to seek the last bit of curious psychol- 
ogy he has heard of, — the wicked Duke that has suddenly 
got converted : 

Jaq. Sir, by j'our patience. If I heard you rightly, 
The Duke hath put on a religious life 
And thrown into neglect the pompous court? 

Jaq. de B. He hath. 

Jaq. To him will I. Out of these convertites 
There is much matter to be heard and learn'd. 

He is Shakespeare's picture of the man who thinks the whole 
great struggle of human life goes on in order that he may 
make a variety of interesting observations upon it, and 
remark that 

all the world's a stage, 
And all the men and women merely players. 



52 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

He is very interesting, but I think Shakespeare's verdict 
upon him, and that of most healthy people, is Rosalind's : 
Yes, you have gained your experience, — 

And your experience makes you sad. I had rather have a fool 
to make me merry than experience to make me sad; and to travel 
for it too! 

In the As You Like It we certainly do have a delight- 
ful fool to make us merry. It is a pity that we have no 
better name than Fool to give to Shakespeare's professed 
jesters, for some of them are among the wisest of his per- 
sonages, and one — the Fool in Lear, that most true and 
tender-hearted man whose laughter has always in it the 
ripple of tears — is surely one of the most profound and 
most pathetic characters Shakespeare ever drew. After him, 
I think the Touchstone of our play stands next. Wit, 
whimsicality, a disposition to trip up the heels of your 
speech on all occasions, love of song, quaint fancy, a kind of 
chartered impudence, and, through it all, glimpses of gentle- 
ness that make you love the fellow after all. He is kind, for 
among the first words we hear him speak are words of pity 
for the poor fellow whose ribs the wrestler has just broken; 
he is of strong affections, for Celia says he will go along over 
the wide world with her. He has a grave philosophic tone 
which gives to the commonplace that air of droll solemnity 
that pleased Jaques so much, but underneath his droll wag- 
gery there is a deal of hard sense. He has kept his eyes 
open, and, as Jaques says, in his brain there are strange 
places crammed with observation. Naturally he is a very 
open and unworldly fellow, only he has so accustomed him- 
self to find out the whimsical side of everything that now he 
doesn't care much for any other. Sidney Smith once said that 
the difference between a Scotchman and other men is that 
the Scotchman always says what is undermost in his mind, 
and I think something like that is true of Touchstone. No 
one of the exiles, you see, finds the woodland life so novel as 
this fool whose life has been spent in making jests for a 
court. It has, indeed, a good many inconveniences, and he 



AS YOU LIKE IT 53 

isn't quite sure whether, on the whole, he likes it, — but it is 
very new : 

Cor. And how like you this shepherd's life, Master Touch- 
stone ? 

Touch. Truly, shepherd, in respect of itself, it is a good life; 
but in respect that it is a shepherd's life, it is naught. In respect 
that it is solitary, I like it very well ; but in respect that it is private, 
it is a very vile life. Now, in respect it is in the fields, it 
pleaseth me well; but in respect it is not in the court, it is tedious. 
As it is a spare life, look you, it fits my humour well; but as there 
is no more plenty in it, it goes much against my stomach. Hast 
any philosophy in thee, shepherd? 

But this strange life does seem to put new sap and green- 
ness into him, and to force into bloom all the poetry and 
humor of his nature. Here in Arden he is no more a fool 
than all the rest. And as this love-making that is going on 
all about him seems to be a charming form of diversion, he 
catches the mania too. The wooing of Touchstone and Au- 
drey is almost as delightful in its way as that of Orlando 
and Rosalind, and of course the one pair of lovers is set over 
against the other in humorous contrast. Touchstone, I take 
it, begins his wooing out of pure whimsicality, because Au- 
drey seems to him like a constant joke. For you will note 
that Touchstone is the only one of the exiles who takes any 
real interest in the rustics that are native to the forest; the 
world of lords and ladies he knows well enough, but he has 
never seen anything like these people before, and he finds 
them vastly diverting. It seems that Touchstone, following 
the example of his betters, had sent some love rhymes, which 
he calls as they were sometimes then called a feature, but 
which Audrey, probably for lack of letters, did but poorly 
appreciate : — 

Touch. Come apace, good Audrey. I will fetch up your 
goats, Audrey. And how, Audrey, am I the man yet? Doth my 
simple feature content you? 

AuD. Your features ! Lord warrant us! what features? 

Touch. I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most capri- 
cious poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths. 



54 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Jaq. (Aside) O knowledge ill-inhabited, worse than Jove in 
a thatch'd house! 

Touch. When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a 
man's good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it 
strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room. 
Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical. 

AuD. I do not know what "poetical" is. Is it honest in deed 
and word? Is it a true thing? 

Touch. No, truly; for the truest poetry is the most feigning; 
and lovers are given to poetry, and what they swear in poetry may 
be said as lovers they do feign. 

AuD. Do you wish then that the gods had made me poetical? 

Touch. I do, truly; for thou swearest to me thou art honest. 
Now, if thou wert a poet, I might have some hope thou didst feign. 

AuD. Well, I am not fair ; and therefore I pray the gods make 
me honest. 

Touch. Truly, and to cast away honesty upon a foul slut 
were to put good meat into an unclean dish, 

AuD. I am not a slut, though I thank the gods I am foul. 

Touch. Well, praised be the gods for thy foulness! Sluttish- 
ness may come hereafter. But be it as it may be, I will marry thee. 

But we are not to think Touchstone's courtship a mere 
piece of waggery throughout. He falls some way Into love 
before he Is through with It. He has to dispose of a rival, 
and that stimulates his liking considerably, I suppose; and 
then Audrey plainly develops new charms of character If not 
of person. She is proud of her suitor and determined not to 
lose him: 

Touch. To-morrow is the joyful day, Audrey; to-morrow 
will we be married. 

AuD. I do wish it with all my heart; and I hope it is no dis- 
honest desire to desire to be a woman of the world. 

Touchstone will be obeyed and will be flattered ; that Is 
evident, and I believe these are sometimes said to be the first 
conditions of happiness In the married life. "What a man 
mostly wants of a wife," says Mrs. Poyser, "Is to make sure 
of one fool as'll tell him he's wise." And then we do not for- 
get the vein of real honesty and goodness underneath Touch- 
stone's quiet exterior; so that at the end I think our wedding 



AS YOU LIKE IT 55 

congratulations may be extended to Touchstone and Audrey 
about as safely as to either of the other happy couples. 

But after all, the interest of the comedy centers about 
Rosalind, — "high-hearted Rosalind, kindling with sunshine 
the dusk greenwood." It is manifestly not necessary or de- 
sirable that we should all of us like the same woman in 
Shakespeare, any more than out of Shakespeare. For my 
own part, if I had to choose among them all, I should say 
without hesitation, that the woman in Shakespeare most al- 
together lovely is Imogen, who combines sweetness, strength, 
and wisdom as no other. But if the question be which one of 
Shakespeare's maiden heroines is most engaging, I fancy 
most readers would be likely to say Rosalind. Which one of 
the whole noble company would you so much like to meet? 
Ophelia is lovely, but weak; Cordelia we should reverence 
as a thing enskyed and sainted; Isabella Is high and severe; 
Portia is just a grain too wise; Juliet one cannot think of 
save as a lover; Miranda and Perdlta are indeed two charm- 
ing young maids, but as yet they are only In the bud of 
womanhood; Jessica is too volatile and girlish; Beatrice, I 
for one should be a little afraid of; Viola — ah there is in- 
deed no one, perhaps, more winning than she, and she has a 
vein of pensive poetry that I do not find in Rosalind, but her 
timid grace would shrink from casual acquaintance : I believe 
after all it would be Rosalind, Orlando is certainly one of 
the luckiest young fellows In Shakespeare. 

And yet It is not the predominance of any particular qual- 
ity that makes Rosalind so attractive but the harmony of so 
many in a healthy, well-balanced nature. For the first im- 
pression Rosalind makes upon one Is that of perfect health, 
physical and mental. And she has that kind of health which 
is actually contagious; It's an inspiration to be in her com- 
pany. She always makes me think of Shelley's line. 

With thy clear, keen joyance 
Languor cannot be. 

Nothing can break the elasticity of her temper. Even in 
moments of weariness and depression her humor bubbles up 



56 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

in some playful jest. "O Jupiter, how weary are my spirits !" 
she cries as at last she reaches the forest, in her disguise, 
just in time to see Celia sink down exhausted at her feet. 

I could find in my heart to disgrace my man's apparel and to 
cry like a woman ; but I must comfort the weaker vessel, as doublet 
and hose ought to show itself courageous to petticoat; therefore, 
courage, good Aliena. 

And the novelty and freshness of this woodland life seem 
to exhilarate her. To play this part of pert and saucy lac- 
quey stimulates her wit and roguishness to the utmost; she 
was never so sprightly and never so charming. And when a 
lucky fate drives Orlando into the forest too, every nerve in 
her finely-strung nature is a-dance with healthy joy: 

look here what I found on a palm tree. I never was so 
berhym'd since Pythagoras' time, that I was an Irish rat, which I 
can hardly remember. 

Cel. Trow you who hath done this? 

Ros. Is it a man? 

Cel. And a chain, that you once wore, about his neck. Change 
you colour? 

Ros. I prithee, who? 

Cel. O Lord, Lord! it is a hard matter for friends to meet; 
but mountains may be removed with earthquakes and so encounter. 

Ros. Nay, but who is it? 

Cel. Is it possible? 

Ros. Nay, I prithee now with most petitionary vehemence, tell 
me who it is. 

Cel. O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful ! 
and yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all whooping! 

Ros. Good my complexion! dost thou think, though I am 
caparison'd Hke a man, I have a doublet and hose in my disposition? 
One inch of delay more is a South-sea of discovery. I prithee, tell 
me who it is quickly, and speak apace. 

Is he of God's making? What manner of man? Is his 
head worth a hat or his chin worth a beard? 

Cel. Nay, he hath but a little beard. 

Ros. Why, God will send more, if the man will be thankful. 
Let me stay the growth of his beard, if thou delay me not the 
knowledge of his chin. 



AS YOU LIKE IT 57 

Cel. It is young Orlando, that tripp'd up the wrestler's heels 
and your heart both in an instant. 

Ros. Nay, but the devil take mocking. Speak sad brow and 
true maid. 

Cel. r faith, coz, 'tis he. 

Ros. Orlando? 

Cel. Orlando. 

Ros. Alas the day! what shall I do with my doublet and hose? 
What did he when thou saw'st him? What said he? How look'd 
he? Wherein went he? What makes he here? Did he ask for 
me? Where remains he? How parted he with thee? And when 
shalt thou see him again ? Answer me in one word. 

Cel. You must borrow me Gargantua's mouth first. 'Tis a 
word too great for any mouth of this age's size. To say ay and no 
to these particulars is more than to answer in a catechism. 

Ros. But doth he know that I am in this forest and in man's 
apparel ? Looks he as freshly as he did the day he wrestled ? 

But it Is not merely the sprightllness of health and high 
spirits that delights us in Rosalind. Her charm, as I have 
already said, is an intellectual one. There is no wit in 
Shakespeare more nimble and fluent. And she is as wise as 
she is witty. I think Rosalind's talk is the best in the world. 
It fairly dances with wit and gayety; and it is very wise and 
pithy too, but its wisdom is not put up in cut and dried 
maxims. Only bores talk those. Rosalind's wisdom is un- 
conscious and incidental, bits of shrewd observation and 
comment that sparkle in the laughing stream of her talk. 
And this talk of Rosalind's is not only full of sense, but of 
sensibility, too. It is all suffused with healthy emotion, and 
every now and then in the midst of its playful mirth there is 
some word of serious tenderness straight from her woman's 
heart. She is a sound-hearted, healthy woman of full-veined 
humanity, with no prudery or sentimentality, self-poised, 
independent, versatile : but in all her masquerading in doub- 
let and hose, she never for a moment loses the fineness and 
delicacy of her woman's nature. Her sensibilities are, in- 
deed, much more delicate than those of Celia; and if she 
does not yield so easily to depression it is because her will is 
so firm and humor so natural to her that she can force even 
her most melancholy moods to wear a smiling face. And 



58 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

how admirable is all her dialogue with Orlando. How she 
enjoys calling out his conferences, rallying his rather moon- 
Ish sentiment with her saucy badinage, tormenting him by 
roguish confessions of her own which he can never guess are 
really from the heart of his very Rosalind. And yet when her 
talk Is most pert and saucy, how far Is It from being loud and 
bold. So much of woman's wit, and grace, and sweetness Is 
there in it, that one almost wonders Orlando didn't find her 
out, — he couldn't have disguised himself from her so, you 
may be sure. She has always a fear that he may detect her. 
That Is what makes her raillery so exhilarating; It 
is the spice of danger that gives zest to her sportiveness. 
Sometimes her real love will speak in spite of herself 
in some word of timid pathos which she can only half con- 
ceal, — 

"But are you so much in love as your rhymes speak?" — 
and then she fears that he will guess her secret, and she goes 
on with a gush of her liveliest banter : 

. . . There is a man haunts the forest, that abuses our 
young plants with carving Rosalind on their barks; hangs odes 
upon hawthornes and elegies upon brambles; all, forsooth, deifying 
the name of Rosalind. If I could meet that fancy-monger, I would 
give him some good counsel, for he seems to have the quotidian of 
love upon him. 

Orl. I am he that is so love-shak'd. I pray you, tell me your 
remedy. 

Ros. There is none of my uncle's marks upon you. He taught 
me how to know a man in love, in which cage of rushes I am sure 
you are not prisoner. 

Orl. What were his marks? 

Ros. A lean cheek, which you have not ; a blue eye and sunken, 
which you have not; an unquestionable spirit, which you have not; 
a beard neglected, which you have not; but I pardon you for that, 
for simply your having in beard is a younger brother's revenue. 
Then your hose should be ungarter'd, your bonnet unhanded, your 
sleeve unbutton'd, your shoe unti'd, and every thing about you 
demonstrating a careless desolation. But you are no such man; you 
are rather point-device in your accoutrements, as loving yourself 
than seeming the lover of any other. 

Orl. Fair youth, I would that I could make thee believe I 
Jove. 



AS YOU LIKE IT 59 

Ros. Me believe it! you may as soon make her that you love 
believe it; which, I warrant, she is apter to do than to confess 
she does. That is one of the points in the which women still give 
the lie to their consciences. But, in good sooth, are you he that 
hangs the verses on the trees, wherein Rosalind is so admired ? 

Orl. I swear to thee, youth, by the white hand of Rosalind, 
I am that he, that unfortunate he. 

Ros. But are you so much in love as your rhymes speak? 

Orl. Neither rhyme nor reason can express how much. 

Ros. Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well 
a dark house and a whip as madmen do ; and the reason why they are 
not so punish'd and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the 
whippers are in love too. 

Indeed they are. For, although with both Rosalind and 
Orlando, it was a case of love at first sight, I think every 
one must see that Rosalind is more deeply smitten. Orlando, 
indeed, protests and sonnetizes most; but Rosalind's is the 
deeper passion. Hers is, in fact, a much deeper and stronger 
nature than Orlando's. Ruskin says somewhere that Shake- 
speare has no heroes, only heroines. Certainly no one has 
shown so well the helpful strength, the native nobility of 
woman's nature. No mere gentle plasticity of soul pleased 
him in woman. Here, it is true, as Ruskin says, that Or- 
lando, noble as he is, would be almost the despairing toy of 
chance, were he not followed, comforted, saved, by Rosa- 
lind. For underneath all her lightness, Rosalind has a high 
womanly conception of the sacredness of her affection. It 
is she, you remember, who says almost solemnly to Phebe, 
who is trying to play the rustic flirt, 

Down on your knees, 
And thank heaven, fasting, for a good man's love. 

But there isn't the slightest particle of sentimentality In her 
love, and she doesn't like to utter it ore rotundo. People 
whose feelings have much depth never do. And so she 
masks it under that arch and delightful humor. Is there 
any passage in Shakespeare where the play of changing 
mood is more charmingly set forth than this? Orlando, 
you remember, has agreed to woo this youth Rosalind, as If 



6o AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

he thought her — what she really is. He has come tardily, 
and she has roguishly kept him waiting some moments pre- 
tending not to see him while she talks to Jaques. Then she 
turns : 

Why, how now, Orlando! Where have you been all this 
while? You a lover! An you serve me such another trick, never 
come in my sight more. 

Orl. My fair Rosalind, I come within an hour of my promise. 

Ros. Break an hour's promise in love! He that will divide a 
minute into a thousand parts, and break but a part of the thousandth 
part of a minute in the affairs of love, it may be said of him that 
Cupid hath clapp'd him o' the shoulder, but I'll warrant him heart- 
whole. 

Orl. Pardon me, dear Rosalind. 

Ros. Nay, an you be so tardy, come no more in my sight. I 
had as lief be woo'd of a snail. 

Orl. Of a snail? 

Ros. Ay, of a snail ; for though he comes slowly, he carries his 
house on his head; a better jointure, I think, than you make a 
woman. . . . 

Come, woo me, woo me; for now I am in a holiday humour and 
like enough to consent. What would you say to me now, an I were 
your very very Rosalind ? 

Orl. I would kiss before I spoke. 

Ros. Nay, you were better speak first; and when you were 
gravell'd for lack of matter, you might take occasion to kiss. . . . 

. . . Am not I your Rosalind? 

Orl. I take some joy to say you are, because I would be talk- 
ing of her. 

Ros. Well, in her person, I say I will not have you. 

Orl. Then in mine own person I die, 

Ros. No, faith, die by attorney. The poor world is almost 
six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man 
died in his own person, videlicet, in a love-cause. Troilus had his 
brains dash'd out with a Grecian club; yet he did what he could to 
die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would 
have liv'd many a fair year though Hero had tum'd nun, if it had 
not been for a hot mid-summer night; for, good youth, he went but 
forth to wash him in the Hellespont and being taken with the 
cramp was drown'd; and the foolish chroniclers of that age found 
it was — Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies. Men have died 
from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love. 



AS YOU LIKE IT 6i 

Orl. I would not have my right Rosalind of this mind ; for, I 
protest, her frown might kill me. 

Ros. By this hand, it will not kill a fly. But come, now I will 
be your Rosalind in a more coming-on disposition; and ask me what 
you will, I will grant it. 

Orl. Then love me, Rosalind. 

Ros. Yes, faith, will I, Fridays and Saturdays and all. 

Orl. And wilt thou have me ? 

Ros. Ay, and twenty such. 

Orl. What sayest thou? 

Ros. Are you not good ? 

Orl. I hope so. 

Ros. Why then, can one desire too much of a good thing? 
Come, sister, you shall be the priest and marry us. Give me your 
hand, Orlando. What do you say, sister? 

Cel. I cannot say the words. 

Ros. You must begin, "Will you, Orlando" — 

Cel. Go to. Will you, Orlando, have to wife this Rosa- 
lind? 

Orl. I will. 

Ros. Ay, but when? 

Orl. Why now; as fast as she can marry us. 

Ros. Then you must say, "I take thee, Rosalind, for wife." 

Orl. I take thee, Rosalind, for wife. 

Ros. I might ask you for your commission ; but I do take thee, 
Orlando, for my husband. There's a girl goes before the priest; 
and certainly a woman's thought runs before her actions. 

Orl. So do all thoughts; they are wing'd. 

Ros. Now tell me how long you would have her after you have 
possess'd her. 

Orl. For ever and a day. 

Ros. Say "a day," without the "ever." No, no, Orlando. Men 
are April when they woo, December when they wed ; maids are May 
when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives. I 
will be more jealous of thee than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his 
hen, more clamorous than a parrot against rain, more new-fangled 
than an ape, more giddy in my desires than a monkey. I will weep 
for nothing, like Diana in the fountain, and I will do that when 
you are dispos'd to be merry. I will laugh like a hyen, and that 
when thou art inclin'd to sleep. 

Orl. But will my Rosalind do so? 

Ros. By my life, she will do as I do. 

Orl. O, but she is wise. 

Ros. Or else she could not have the wit to do this. The wiser, 
the waywarden Make the doors upon a woman's wit and it will 



62 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

out at the casement; shut that and 't will out at the key-hole; stop 
that, 't will fly with the smoke out at the chimney. 

Cel. You have simply misus'd our sex in your love-prate. . . . 
Ros. O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know 
how many fathom deep I am in love ! 

Surely we can guess. You all remember that scene when 
Rosalind stands by to hear with trembling heart the story 
of Orlando's brotherly love and valor, as his brother tells 
it, until at the sight of the kerchief wet with blood her 
woman's nature can endure it no longer and she swoons, 
only to unclose her eyes again in a moment and call out with 
an attempt at the old saucy manner : 

a body would think this was well counterfeited! 
I pray you, tell 3^our brother how well I counterfeited. Heigh- 
ho! .. . But, i' faith, I should have been a woman by right. 

Counterfeiting after that was impossible, and when next 
he meets her, I think Orlando has detected her disguise, 
though with manly dignity and tenderness he will not say 
so, nor urge any disclosure until she is pleased to make it. 
Where is there a more charming love story? 

I have said nothing of Adam, the old servant, whose 
fidelity to Orlando is such a proof of Orlando's own good- 
ness, or of Silvius, the type of rustic faith, and Phebe, the 
mincing, kittenish little rustic flirt, with the jet black hair 
and bugle-eyeballs, whose witless and heartless attempts at 
coquetry with Silvius serve to show the more admirably 
how much there is both of wit and heart in Rosalind. 

But something of the charm of the play evaporates in any 
attempt to analyze its different characters. It is only when 
we think of it entire, as a picture of fresh woodland health 
and joy, that we feel its charm. To read it or to remember 
it is a true refreshment of soul, and brings not only light- 
some thoughts but some of that 

Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, 
Truth breathed by cheerfulness 

of v/hich Wordsworth sings. 



AS YOU LIKE IT 63 

Only I must remind you that at the close of the play, 
Shakespeare sends all his persons back into the world again. 
We cannot sever permanently our obligations to society, nor 
hope for very long to fleet the time carelessly as they did 
in the golden age. Nor would we. No high culture of soul is 
possible unless we take up our duties in the thick of life, or 
even any high enjoyment. Delightful as is the Forest of 
Arden, to stay there always would not be As We Like It. 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 

SHAKESPEARE was not a man of many books. I sup- 
pose there was nothing at New Place that could by any 
stretch of logic have been called a library. Yet there 
were three or four books that he must have known thor- 
oughly, and one of these, perhaps the best known of all, was 
one of the world's great books, — Plutarch's Lives. It is 
pleasant to be able to be sure that we know in just what 
translation he read it, and to see again and again not only 
the thought or the incident but even the language of that ad- 
mirable old translation appearing in his plays. For I think 
there has never been a translation of Plutarch whose English 
can for a moment compare in vigor and dramatic raciness 
with that old one by Sir Thomas North, 1579, which Shake- 
speare must have used. 

Shakespeare's play of Antony and Cleopatra is not merely 
based on Plutarch's Life of Mark Antony, but it follows 
Plutarch so closely that it might almost be called a poetic 
paraphrase. In no one of Shakespeare's plays does he keep 
so close to his original. In most cases, as you know, he has 
drawn from his authorities only names and the outline of a 
plot; here, however, not only the names but the essentials of 
the character of the Antony, the Cleopatra, the Octavius of 
the play are all to be found in Plutarch. Enobarbus is per- 
haps the only person of much importance in the play for 
whose character Shakespeare did not get many essential 
hints from Plutarch. And more than this, the events of the 
play, even the minor and incidental ones that seem as you 
read them almost certain to have been invented by Shake- 
speare are, in fact, almost all taken out of Plutarch; so that 
it is hardly too much to say that there is not a page of the 
drama in which you cannot find traces of Plutarch either in 
the incidents or the language. 

64 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 65 

Yet the art of Shakespeare is hardly less wonderful here 
than elsewhere. What Plutarch has merely described, he has 
re-created. Plutarch gives us a very entertaining account of 
the relations of Antony and Cleopatra ; Shakespeare brings 
the two actually before us in all the abundant energy and 
passion of warm breathing life. The story has been often 
told and has been dramatized in almost every literature; but 
it is still true, I believe, that it is to Shakespeare we must go 
if we would know the living Cleopatra as she was, and un- 
derstand all the witchery of her nature. It was left to 
Shakespeare to make the world acquainted with Cleopatra. 

The play is, of course, in some sense a sequel to the Julius 
Casar; but it is certain there must have been a considerable 
interval between them. Julius Casar is one of the ear- 
liest in the great line of tragedies, probably the first; but it is 
clear both from external and internal evidence that the An- 
tony and Cleopatra must be put somewhat later. In manner 
it is akin to Shakespeare's very latest work. For Shake- 
speare as he grew older seems to have grown more and more 
careless of mere regularity of form, and more and more full 
and rich in the content of his language. It must be admitted, 
I should think, that the construction of this play of Antony 
and Cleopatra is very far from perfect. In the endeavor 
to follow Plutarch closely Shakespeare has confused the ac- 
tion of the play, broken it up into small pieces, — there are 
thirteen scenes in the Third Act and fifteen in the Fourth Act, 
you remember, — and scattered it all the way from Rome to 
Parthia. Perhaps, indeed, he does in this way give us an idea 
of the extent and variety of the interests which depended 
upon Antony, and which he sacrificed to the enchantress of 
Egypt; yet it seems to me that by reducing somewhat the 
number of minor characters and concentrating the action in 
masses he might have given to the form of the play greater 
unity and strength. But if the play be somewhat faulty in 
structure, its style, on the other hand, is that of Shake- 
speare's ripest period, — full, energetic, swift, sententious. In 
point of style, indeed, I sometimes think it Is his very best 
play. There are scattered through it passages of profound 



66 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

reflection, bits of pithy wisdom that drop like fruitful seed 
into the mind. Yet Antony and Cleopatra is not the tragedy 
of thought but the tragedy of passion, and the best excel- 
lences of its style are such as we should expect in such a play. 
It is a style of passionate vigor and audacity. It abounds in 
passages in which thought and emotion seem fused in some 
glowing phrase that makes our ordinary English seem cold 
and diffuse. Coleridge puts it well when he speaks of the 
"happy valiancy of style" in this play as compared with 
Shakespeare's other works. There is an eastern opulence 
and prodigality in its sensuous imagery, an intensity and des- 
peration in its passion, under which language fairly seems to 
strain and sway. Any one familiar with the course of 
Shakespeare's work must feel sure, it seems to me, that the 
Antony and Cleopatra belongs to the period of his greatest 
wisdom and vigor. 

Coleridge — to whose fragmentary notes I frequently re- 
fer because they seem to me more suggestive than any other 
— says that "of all Shakespeare's historical plays Antony and 
Cleopatra is by far the most wonderful." Other good critics 
have pronounced it the greatest of all his tragedies. It is 
perhaps idle to attempt to fix, in this way, the relative rank of 
Shakespeare's great dramas; but it has always seemed to me 
that the impression the Antony and Cleopatra leaves upon 
us is peculiar, and in some respects unlike that we get from 
any other of Shakespeare's works. For my own part, I 
think I must say that no one of all Shakespeare's plays ex- 
erts a greater fascination upon me while I am reading it. 
Whether one will or no, it captivates the imagination, stirs 
the blood, and hurries one out of himself. As I read the 
story of Antony's final unavailing struggle with his passion 
for the serpent of old Nile, of his last gaudy night and the 
desperation of the next day, I can never sit still in my chair. 
But when one puts down the book, the spell is broken. I 
think the play does not take hold upon our thought so power- 
fully, or so often steal into our reflection as many others do. 
Antony and Cleopatra are not the companions of our quiet 
hours, as Hamlet and Desdemona and Rosalind, and even 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 67 

Hotspur and Falstaff, are. While we move with them 
through the drama they captivate our senses and imagina- 
tion, sum up all that is gorgeous and ensnaring, but they do 
not visit our reverie or enliven our solitude. And I suppose 
a moment's thought will show why this must be so. This 
is a tragedy of passion, and passion is by its very nature, 
spasmodic, fitful, transient. We are not merely to be told 
what is the power of Cleopatra, we must be made to feel 
it ourselves. Shakespeare actually makes us pass for a time 
under the spell of her magic, that we may know in what 
strong toil of grace Antony is entangled. But this fascina- 
tion gets so little hold upon intellect or reflection that when 
we emerge from it, the play leaves less in our recollections 
than many others do. This may be all a fancy of mine, — • 
but so it has always seemed to me. 

And while I should by no means call Antony and Cleo- 
patra Shakespeare's greatest play, I am inclined to think it 
is the most powerful in its immediate effect upon our sen- 
sibilities, and that more than any other one it shows 
his subtle mastery in the dramatic rendering of changing 
passion. 

The title of the play suggests its theme, — the passion of 
Antony for Cleopatra. Everything is subservient to that. 
It is the struggle of a powerful nature in the toils of an at- 
tachment which he knows is costing him his friends, his 
empire, his hopes, and what is worse, his native force of 
will, and mastery of circumstance; an attachment which he 
knows is based on no truth or real affection, and which he 
never dares to trust with calm confidence for a single hour, 
but which, in spite of all, he knows he shall never escape 
from, and which, in his inmost heart, he doesn't wish to es- 
cape from. The hatred of all his countrymen at home, the 
clouding of his honor and the repulse of his ambition, the 
loss of the empire of half the world, — he will risk them all 
for one kiss from those lips that he knows may be forsworn 
to-morrow : 

Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch 
Of the rang'd empire fall ! Here is my space. 



68 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Where is there any record of an infatuation so entire, a 
fascination so superb? For Shakespeare takes care that we 
shall not look upon the downward career of this man with 
mere scorn. He knew that Antony didn't lose the world for 
nothing! He knew that the pleasures of sin, though but for 
a season, are very real pleasures while they last; and he had 
none of that cheap morality that is afraid to say so. And he 
makes us own it too. As we read, something of the magic 
of this great queen o' the world falls over us : we under- 
stand the resistless enchantment that is upon Antony. And 
when we understand that, we cannot stand aloof in cool in- 
difference and condemn him. Yet all this dazzle of the 
lust of the eyes and the pride of life does not for a mo- 
ment blind us to the moral quality of Antony's action and 
the inevitable doom which he is every moment nearing. 
Precisely there resides the tragedy. We see his man- 
hood ebbing away, his iron resolution growing soft and 
pliant, and 

his captain's heart, 
Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst 
The buckles on his breast, 

losing Its soldier's temper and, warmed no longer by any 
chaste or temperate affection, bursting at last in shame and 
desperation. I think Shakespeare's moral steadiness is no- 
where better shown than by the way in which, through- 
out the drama, he depicts with even-handed justice at once 
the charms and the results of sin. 

It will be remembered that Julius Csesarwas assassinated 
in March of the year 44 B.C., and that it was two years 
after, 42, that the conspirators Brutus and Cassius were de- 
feated in that great battle near Philippi which gave the gov- 
ernment of the Roman world to the Triumvirs, Antony, 
Octavius, and Lepidus. The Eastern Empire fell to the 
share of Antony, and it was in the next year, 41, while he 
was on an expedition against the Parthians, that he had that 
first meeting with Cleopatra on the river Cydnus which 
Shakespeare, following Plutarch, has described so gorgeously 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 69 

in the Second Act of the play. The result of this meeting 
was that she carried him away the captive of her charms to 
Alexandria, where he gave himself up to all luxury for more 
than a year. At home in Italy his wife, Fulvia, and her 
brother, Lucius, without his knowledge and, it was thought, 
with a desire to call him away from Egypt, made war upon 
Octavius; but before the war was fairly begun Fulvia died, 
and Antony was summoned to Rome to compose matters. 
It is at this point that the action of the play begins, about 
40 B.C. Between this date and the death of Cleopatra with 
which it closes, about ten years actually elapsed; but in no 
one of his plays is Shakespeare more careless about making 
the dramatic sequence correspond closely to the historical 
order of events; and we must be content to say that between 
the marriage of Antony to Octavia and the battle of Actium 
some eight and a half years must be supposed to intervene. 
The events of the last two and a half Acts are all included 
in three days. 

In the picture of Antony which he draws for us in Julius 
Casar, as in this play, Shakespeare has undoubtedly left out 
some of the cruelty and excesses with which Antony's earlier 
years had been stained, and has dwelt more upon his courage, 
skill, and address. Yet in neither play is Antony represented 
as having ever been a very noble man. As we see him in the 
Julius Casar he is a good deal of a demagogue, fluent of 
speech, of great versatility, and of much energy in emer- 
gencies. When he says in his funeral oration over Caesar 
that he is "no orator as Brutus is" but only a plain, blunt 
man who speaks right on, we know of course that he is the 
consummate orator. Yet we should not think that his asser- 
tion is entirely a piece of conscious artifice. He was not ex- 
actly a plain, blunt man, but he was an impulsive, rather than 
a crafty man, Plutarch says, in fact, that he was a plain 
man without subtlety, and therefore over late found out the 
faults that others committed against him. He was evidently 
of warm passions, many generous impulses, and most engag- 
ing manners. In reality selfish and designing, he had none 
of that cold and wary manner which makes selfish and de- 



70 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

signing men unpopular; on the contrary, he seemed hearty, 
open, and impetuous. He was, in fact, often liberal and mag- 
nanimous. He showed a ready appreciation of kindness in 
his friends and of greatness whether in friends or foes. His 
grief for Caesar, if not deep, was genuine, and that was why 
it told so upon the populace. And you remember his burst 
of generous admiration over the body of the fallen Brutus ; 

This was the noblest Roman of them all. 

His life was gentle, and the elements 

So mix'd in him, that Nature might stand up 

And say to all the world, "This was a man !" 

To these qualities he added a reckless daring, a capacity 
for the brilliant and unexpected which always makes a man 
a popular leader, if not a safe one. His very vices seemed 
to display a certain opulence and prodigality of nature which 
cast a glitter in the eyes of the mob. The cold Octavius says 
with a twinge of envy that he is 

the abstract of all faults 
That men do follow. 

Yet, reckless and profuse as he was, he had a resolute will 
and an iron temper; men wondered to see this man, who 
was a curled and fashionable courtier and demagogue at 
home, put on an almost stoical endurance, a genuine Roman 
hardihood in the field. 

A great man, this Antony, certainly, if not a wise one; 
combining, as few men of his time could, strength and bril- 
liancy, both in the forum and in the field. But though his 
character had many striking and some heroic qualities, it 
never had much moral elevation. He admired virtue and 
could say very noble things about it; but seemed to think, 
as men often do, that a generous recognition of virtue in 
others would atone for a lack of it in himself. I think you 
will find that moral ideas never took any real hold upon him 
or influenced greatly his conduct. All his struggles to get 
free from Cleopatra are prompted by a wounded pride and 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 71 

by a constant tormenting knowledge that he is losing his 
native self-mastery and manhood, rather than by any sense 
of the moral degradation involved in that sweet slavery. 

And now how natural it is that such a man as this should 
be taken captive by the fascinations of the great Egyptian 
Queen. He is already well advanced in life, 'when gray 
doth something mingle with his younger brown,' and far 
past those early days when the dreams of imagination 
throw a halo over passion that seems at once to enhance 
and to excuse it. No slight or passing grace can ensnare 
his fancy now. His life has been a rough and changeful 
one, and he stands at the climax of his ambition, one 
third of the world at his feet. Yet empire will never 
satisfy him. He is not of the stuff out of which the 
world's great conquerors have been made. His nature 
is too impulsive, passionate, and sensuous. In his soul 
love of pleasure is always struggling with love of power; 
and he feels that the toils, the conflict, the anxiety are 
a dear price to pay for the lonely and hateful eminence of 
rule. Then upon this man's life burst the splendor of Cleo- 
patra. She is no mere girl : though younger than Antony she 
is "with Phoebus' amorous pinches black, and wrinkled deep 
in time." Something of the beauty of her earlier years may 
have faded; but it isn't chiefly her beauty of person that en- 
snares Antony. It isn't for a moment to be supposed that 
the attachment between them was one of mere animal pas- 
sion. In this Queen are met all charms that can delight the 
rich and sensuous imagination of Antony. The splendor of 
her court, the Eastern magnificence of all her surroundings, 
the strange and varied opulence of her own nature, all de- 
lights, save moral ones, combine to weave that fascination 
which subdues not only the passions, but the intellect, the 
imagination, the will of this man. When the play opens, 
Antony is already won, — the whole drama is only the record 
of a series of struggles to be free, every one of which leaves 
him more entangled than before. We see from the start that 
his doom is sealed. Yet at first his nature is not entirely sub- 
dued. When the messenger arrives that informs him of the 



72 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

death of Fulvia, though at first he will not hear the unwel- 
come tidings, yet his soldier's nature revives, and for a time 
gains the mastery. There is a burst of genuine and envying 
admiration for Fulvia, whose woman's daring shames his 
idle delays. "There's a great spirit gone 1" cries he; and for 
a little he steels himself against the persuasions of Cleo- 
patra and resolves to go back to Rome. He goes ; but he will 
not think of breaking away from his bondage permanently, 
but gives a pledge at going that will bind him to return and 
make him her servant while he is away, — 

Quarrel no more, [my queen,] but be prepar'd to know 

The purposes I bear; which are, or cease, 

As you shall give the advice. By the fire 

That quickens Nilus' slime, I go from hence 

Thy soldier, servant; making peace or war 

As thou affects. 

The Second Act and the first six scenes of the Third 
serve to show the variety and the urgency of those affairs of 
state which should have kept Antony away from Egypt, and 
the growing quarrel with Octavius which his infatuation for 
Cleopatra at last raised to that great conflict which ended in 
his downfall. The third Triumvir, Lepidus, that "slight, un- 
meritable man," is evidently a mere puppet in the hands of 
the other two that they will play with so long as they choose 
and then throw by. He is a weak, easy man, and there is 
something almost pathetic in the way he moves about in the 
shadow of the two great world-rulers that tower on either 
side of him, and affably hopes they will not quarrel. When 
they do seem inclined to quarrel, he is quite unable to do any- 
thing to conciliate them; but can only second with weak 
eagerness any suggestions that others may make: 'Soft, 
soft, Cassar!' ' 'T is noble spoken, Antony,' and 'Aye, aye, 
worthily spoken, good Maecenas.' A poor, fluttering little 
man, doomed to fall between the incensed points of these 
two mighty opposites. 

Lepidus once gone, Antony and Octavius are left to play 
out the great game alone. As Enobarbus says, 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 73 

Then, world, thou hast a pair of chaps, no more; 
And throw between them all the food thou hast, 
They'll grind the one the other. 

Octavius, afterwards the great Augustus Caesar, but 
now a youth of twenty, is in the play the cool, quiet, self- 
restrained watchful man that, as I understand, the historians 
take him to have been. There are no enthusiasms or illu- 
sions about him. No heat of passion will blind him, and not 
even Cleopatra can ever snare him in her strong toil of 
grace. As I read his talk in this play, I always think of those 
two great marbles in the Vatican, the one the bust of the 
young Augustus, the other the statue of Augustus the Em- 
peror, both of which alike have the firm compressed lip, the 
air of calm, self-contained dignity, unflinching resolution and 
mastery. His shrewd and steady diplomacy Is set In admir- 
able contrast with the Impulsive and ardent nature of An- 
tony. 

That first conference between the two men after An- 
tony reaches Rome seems to me one of the greatest of 
Shakespeare's many passages of diplomatic dialogue (II, I, 
27 ff.). Both men are embarrassed at the meeting, but An- 
tony broaches their differences at once, while Caesar Is In- 
clined to be reticent and doesn't allow himself for an instant 
to be moved from his Imperturbable calm. With unbroken 
dignity he urges one charge after another, and Antony 
somewhat Impatiently refutes them all, as Octavius doubt- 
less supposed he would. For he had really no intention 
of quarreling with Antony then; It wasn't safe while 
Pompey was so threatening. He only enumerates the 
charges that he may seem to put Antony under some obliga- 
tion, and may the more emphasize his own seeming gener- 
osity in the proposition he knows Agrlppa Is to make In a 
moment. Accordingly, when he has nothing more to urge he 
adds, 

Yet, if I knew 

What hoop should hold us stanch, from edge to edge 

O' the world I would pursue it. 

At which word Agrlppa, who knows his cue, breaks In : 



74 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

To hold you in perpetual amity, 

To make you brothers, and to knit your hearts 

With an unslipping knot, take Antony 

Octavia to his wife; whose beauty claims 

No worse a husband than the best of men ; 

Whose virtue and whose general graces speak 

That which none else can utter. By this marriage, 

All little jealousies, which now seem great, 

And all great fears, which now import their dangers, 

Would then be nothing. Truths would be tales. 

Where now half-tales be truths ; her love to both 

Would each to other and all loves to both 

Draw after her. Pardon what I have spoke ; 

For 'tis a studied, not a present thought. 

By duty ruminated. 

To all of which Caesar says not a word: till Antony asks 

Will Cassar speak? 

C^s. Not till he hears how Antony is touch'd 
With what is spoke already. 

Ant. What power is in Agrippa, 

If I would say, "Agrippa, be it so," 
To make this good ? 

C^s. The power of Caesar, and 

His power unto Octavia. 

The impulsive Antony is caught and adds, — 

May I never 
To this good purpose, that so fairly shows. 
Dream of impediment! Let me have thy hand. 
Further this act of grace; and from this hour 
The heart of brothers govern in our loves 
And sway our great designs! 

1 think he is sincere: he has no quarrel with Caesar, and 
now that he is well out of Egypt he can keep for a little while 
his resolution to be himself again and accept the rule of the 
one half world that is his due. But two such mates in empire 
could not stall together in the whole world, as Caesar says; 
and we see that it is Antony who must go down. In any 
case he must have proved eventually no match for such a 
cool and steady gamester as Octavius; but as it is, we know 
he will be seduced from duty by a thousand delicious memo- 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 75 

rles to which he must yield at last. No one knows him so 
well as Enobarbus; and when Maecenas says, "Now Antony 
must leave her utterly," it is Enobarbus who answers quietly, 
"Never; he will not." 

Shakespeare has given us but a glimpse of the modest 
beauty and grace of Octavia. We see her when she takes 
her husband's hand and says farewell to her brother — "The 
April's in her eyes; it is love's spring, And these the showers 
to bring it on" ; and we see her once more when she comes 
back again alone to that brother in the vain attempt to make 
peace between him and her husband: 

Ay me, most wretched, 
That have my heart parted betwixt two friends 
That do afflict each other. 

And that is almost all. Shakespeare could hardly show us 
more of her without lessening that impression of still 
modesty which is her greatest charm. She has evidently a 
good deal of her brother's quiet firmness, and a certain 
moral dignity of character that win our respect: she was a 
Roman lady. But it was impossible that such a woman 
should ever make Antony forget the magic of that serpent 
of old Nile. "Octavia," says Enobarbus, "is of a holy, cold, 
and still conversation." "Who would not have his wife 
so?" replies Menas. To which Enobarbus returns, "Not 
he that himself is not so; which is Mark Antony." 

The character of Pompey is not elaborated at all: he is 
introduced, I suppose, for the sake of fidelity to the history, 
and I cannot help thinking that the play would gain in unity 
and conciseness if his part, as well as some others, had been 
left out altogether. One scene, however, in which he figures, 
we could ill spare, — the banquet which Pompey gives the 
Triumvirs on board his galley. It does not advance the 
action of the play at all; but Shakespeare apparently 
couldn't resist the irony in this picture of the men who ruled 
the whole world in drunken carouse together. Poor Lepi- 
dus is the first to succumb, and maunders on in a feeble 
attempt to give some intellectual direction to his talk: 



76 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Lep. You've strange serpents there? 
Ant. Ay, Lepidus. 

Lep. Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud by the 
operation of your sun. So is your crocodile. 
Ant. They are so. 

Lep. I am not so well as I should be. . . . 

Nay, certainly, I have heard the Ptolemies, pyramises are 
very goodly things; without contradiction I have heard that. 

What manner o' thing is your crocodile? 

Ant. It is shap'd, sir, like itself; and it is as broad as it hath 
breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with it own organs. 
It lives by that which nourisheth it; and the elements once out of it, 
it transmigrates. 

Lep. What colour is it of ? 

Ant. Of it own colour too. 

Lep. 'Tis a strange serpent. 

Ant. Tis so. And the tears of it are wet. 

'Keep off these quicksands, Lepidus, for you sink,' calls 
Antony, as the first third of the world falls under the table. 
Cold Octavius protests, but he, too, has to join the ring and 
join the song: 

Come, thou monarch of the vine, 
Plumpy Bacchus with pink eyne! 

With thy grapes our hairs be crown'd! 
Cup us, till the world go round, 
Cup us, till the world go round ! 

and he finds with odd vexation that his tongue begins to 
split as well as his head. The rough Pompey grows maudlin 
— "O, Antony, You have my father's house, — But what? 
we are friends." And stout Enobarbus himself is so dis- 
guised in liquor that he can only hiccup out 

Ho! says 'a. There's my cap, 

as the great men take themselves off. Only Antony keeps 
his head completely, though he drinks more than all the 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 77 

rest. He had been in Egypt. What a picture that 1 As one 
writer says, it glows before us like some warm canvas of 
Rubens. And what a hint is given of the condition of a 
world of which these men were rulers ! 

Enobarbus was certainly far gone at Pompey's banquet; 
but that is the only time he loses his native wisdom and self- 
command. Enobarbus is, after Antony and Cleopatra, the 
most interesting character of the play, — perhaps the only 
honest man in it, and, I am much inclined to think, the 
wisest. Since there is no part which he can take in the 
action, he goes through the play as a keen quiet observer, 
with a blunt openness of spirit, and a caustic humor which 
nobody escapes. Almost all the wit and wisdom of the play 
you will find is uttered by Enobarbus; as the passion is by 
Antony and Cleopatra. He fully appreciates the magic of 
Cleopatra, while he is entirely proof against it himself. He 
knows Antony thoroughly, and sees from the start whither 
his course inevitably tends. Through it all he is Antony's 
best friend, and his judgment never is at fault. At first he 
tries to sting Antony into action by his satire, and does 
actually succeed in doing so: 

Eno. What's, your pleasure, sir? 

Ant. I must with haste from hence. 

End. Why, then, we kill all our women. We sec how mortal 
an unkindness is to them; if they suffer our departure, death's the 
word. 

Ant. I must be gone. 

Eno. Under a compelling occasion, let women die. It were 
pity to cast them away for nothing; though, between them and a 
great cause, they should be esteemed nothing. Cleopatra, catching 
but the least noise of this, dies instantly; I have seen her die twenty 
times upon far poorer moment. . . . 

Ant. She is cunning past man's thought. 

Eno. Alack, sir, no; her passions are made of nothing but the 
finest part of pure love. We cannot call her winds and waters 
sighs and tears; they are greater storms and tempests than almanacs 
can report. This cannot be cunning in her; if it be, she makes a 
shower of rain as well as Jove. 

Ant. Would I had never seen her ! 

End. O, sir, you had then left unseen a wonderful piece of 



78 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

work; which not to have been blest withal would have discredited 
your travel. 

Ant. Fulvia is dead. 

Eno. Sir? 

Ant. Fulvia is dead. 

Eno. Fulvia ! 

Ant. Dead. 

Eno. Why, sir, give the gods a thankful sacrifice. When it 
pleaseth their deities to take the wife of a man from him, it shows to 
man the tailors of the earth; comforting therein, that when old 
robes are worn out, there are members to make new. If there were 
no more women but Fulvia, then had you indeed a cut, and the case 
to be lamented. This grief is crown'd with consolation; your old 
smock brings forth a new petticoat: and indeed the tears live in an 
onion that should water this sorrow. 

Ant. The business she hath broached in the state 
Cannot endure my absence. 

Eno. And the business you have broach'd here cannot be without 
you; especially that of Cleopatra's, which wholly depends on your 
abode. 

Ant. No more light answers. 

Nothing could have so effectually spurred the doubting 
determination of Antony as these words of Enobarbus which 
set his own weaker thoughts before him in grave irony. 
After Actium Enobarbus has no hope for Antony; but he 
will not leave him like the rest. Singularly cool In temper 
he seems to have no passionate attachment even to Antony, 
and this lack of enthusiasm only makes his grim Roman fi- 
delity show the more noble. He'll follow yet the wounded 
chance of his master, though his reason sits i' the wind 
against it. "Mine honesty," says he, 

and I begin to square. 

yet he that can endure 
To follow with allegiance a fallen lord 
Doth conquer him that did his master conquer, 
And earns a place i' the story. 

At last, for one fatal hour, his reason gets the better of 
his fidelity, and he deserts his fallen and desperate lord. 
But when Antony with that impulsive magnanimity so char- 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 79 

acterlstic of him, sends his forgiveness and bounty after his 
old servant, the big heart of Enobarbus breaks for shame, 
and he dies with words of bitter self-accusing on his lips : 

Be witness to me, O thou blessed moon, 
When men revolted shall upon record 
Bear hateful memory, poor Enobarbus did 
Before thy face repent! 

O sovereign mistress of true melancholy, 
The poisonous damp of night disponge upon me, 
That life, a very rebel to my will, 
May hang no longer on me. 

O Antony, 
Nobler than my revolt is infamous, 
Forgive me in thine own particular; 
But let the world rank me in register 
A master-leaver and a fugitive. 
O Antony! O Antony! 

And you will see how this spectacle of the dying fidelity of 
Enobarbus heightens our pity for Antony, by reminding us 
of that native generosity of soul that could win such faith. 

But all the characters of the play pale beside the splendor 
of the great Queen. I don't see how any man can read the 
drama without coming under the fascination of Cleopatra ; 
but it is hard to say just what is the nature of the charm. 
Shakespeare has drawn no character, perhaps, that is more 
intricate, subtle, and dazzling, — and I may add he has drawn 
none with greater vigor and heartiness of interest. It is 
certainly not an unreasonable conjecture that "the dark lady" 
of the later sonnets was in his thoughts and inspired his 
pen as he drew this wonderfully vivid Cleopatra, that will 
now always be the Cleopatra of history; and it is another 
interesting, though perhaps less probable, conjecture that 
the original both of the dark lady of the sonnets and of the 
Cleopatra of the play was that strange and wildly beautiful 
woman whose life was darkly linked with that of several of 
the best and greatest of Englishmen, Penelope Devereux, 
the sister of young Essex, and the Stella of Philip Sidney. 



8o AN OLD CASTLE AND OTlll-R ESSAYS 

Of course the attraction of Cleopatra does not reside 
principally in her personal beauty, for that can only be sug- 
gested in poetry and Antony doesn't say much about it. And 
though the lower and more sensual siilc of her nature is 
everywhere so clearly indicated that we arc in no danger of 
giving her our respect, yet it is indicated only in casual and 
indirect ways, — mostly by the talk of her attendants, Iras 
and Charmian. We are not allowed to think the great 
Queen gross. Her principal external charm would seem to 
have been an imperial grace of manner which could defy all 
convention and embellish the meanest actions; "I saw her 
once," says Enobarbus, 

Hop forty paces through the public street; 

And havintj lost her breath, she spoke, and panted, 

That she did make defect perfection. 

What impresses us most in Cleopatra is a kind of East- 
ern magnificence and voluptuousness, an opulence of nature. 
Her imagination is gorgeous in its coloring, her conceptions 
have an oriental vastncss and splendor, her passions a fire 
and intensity such as we can hardly think of in any other 
woman of history. She is no longer young; her beauty is in 
its ripe autumnal maturity; but the fulness and force of life 
in her character is wonderful. There is a bewitching 
changefulness in her moods: — haughty and defiant, then 
insinuating and tender; magnificently willful, then softly 
yielding; splcndiilly seductive, then titnidly retiring; wildly 
mirthful, then classically elegant; superbly proud, then 
voluptuously languishing, — she is all these by turns, and all 
these varied moods and passions seem to spring spontane- 
ously out of the exhaustless riches of her nature. As J'',no- 
barbus says, 

Aij;c cannot wither her, nor custom stale 
Her infinite variety. 

This continued changefulness of mood is partly the re- 
sult of her naturally impetuous and unregulated temper, 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 8i 

which knows no higher motive than the constant chase of 
pleasure; hut it is heightened hy all the arts of the most 
perfect coquetry, which she has practiced so long that they 
have become a kind of second nature. You can never tell 
exactly how far she is sincere; because, indeed, she doesn't 
know herself. And she is well aware that in this variety 
and intensity of excitement resides her chief attraction for 
others, as well as the only happiness for herself. For you 
will not find in Cleopatra any repose of nature, nor any of 
that dignity which comes from settled calm of soul. Of 
course that would be impossible without self-command, and 
some moral qualities to which she is a stranger. And that is 
one reason why her fascination, though so resistless, is so 
unsteady. Antony is constantly breaking away from it, and 
she always brings him back again by some fresh surprise of 
charm more potent than the last. 

But although Cleopatra has all the weaknesses of a pas- 
sionate nature without any moral steadiness, yet even her 
very wilfulness and impatience have a queenly volume and 
force that command our admiration if not our respect; so 
that what in a more meager and acrid nature would be 
mere scolding or vacillation is lifted into poetry by this 
"wrangling queen whom everything becomes." You remem- 
ber how she received the messenger that brought the news 
of Antony's marriage to Octavia (II, v, 23 ff.). The play 
of sudden and ungovernable passion, the strange mixture of 
tenderness and anger, make an admirable picture of the 
varied and ill-regulated temper of this great Queen. 
Very characteristic is it, too, I think, that the Queen when 
she has had a little time to recover from the first shock 
of her anger and grief, should feel sure of her ability to re- 
cover Antony (III, iii, 7-45). 

Doubtless we should not apply the sacred name of love 
to a passion into which selfish and sensual elements so 
largely enter; yet it was genuine and intense and engaged the 
whole nature of Cleopatra. Antony does seem to her the 
greatest of men. His rich sensuous tastes are akin to hers; 
and his daring, his profusion, his very carelessness of the 



82 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

proud prizes of empire seem to her the proofs of a great 
spirit. Beside such a man the kings who kissed her hand 
in earlier days seem small in her memory : great Pompey 
was a weakling, and broad-fronted Julius himself cold and 
no bounteous lover. You remember her magnificent out- 
burst to Dolabella after Antony's death; it will indicate how 
vast Antony had loomed before her imagination : 

Cleo. I dream'd there was an Emperor Antony. 
O, such another sleep, that I might see 
But such another man ! ' 

DoL. If it might please ye, — 

Cleg. His face was as the heavens; and therein stuck 
A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted 
The little O, the earth. 

DoL. Most sovereign creature, — 

Cleo. His legs bestrid the ocean ; his rear'd arm 
Crested the vi^orld ; his voice was propertied 
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends; 
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb, 
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty. 
There was no winter in 't ; an autumn 't was 
That grew the more by reaping. His delights 
Were dolphin-like, they show'd his back above 
The element they liv'd in. In his livery 
Walk'd crowns and crownets; realms and islands were 
As plates dropp'd from his pocket. 

DoL. Cleopatra ! 

Cleo. Think you there was or might be such a man 
As this I dream'd of ? 

DoL. Gentle madam, no. 

Cleo. You lie, up to the hearing of the gods! 

To have ensnared such a man as that in her strong toil 
of grace, to know the ruler of the one half world is at her 
feet, that satisfies at once her love of power and her love 
of pleasure and sets her pulses a-throbbing with the proud 
joy of passionate conquest. All her thoughts of him while 
he is away are full of that sweet sense of mastery, — 

O Charmian, 
Where think'st thou he is now? . . . He's speaking now, 
Or murmuring, "Where's my serpent of old Nile?" 
For so he calls me. 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATKA 83 

Yet with all this pride of conquest there is blended some 
more generous feeling. Her real admiration for Antony has 
kindled all the enthusiasm of her nature, and has centered 
upon him all her hopes and all her desires. He has come 
to seem a part of herself. There isn't, to be sure, any entire 
unselfish devotion in her passion, but a kind of desperate 
self-abandonment. She has thrown all the witchery of her 
nature into the conquest of this man and she has magnifi- 
cently won: henceforth his love is the prize without which 
life would lose its value. She couldn't die for him, but she 
could die with him. 

After the shame of Antony's defeat at Actium, her grief 
springs in great part from sincere sympathy for him, rather 
than from mere personal apprehension for herself. In that 
first interview with Antony after his flight, when she stands 
before him in tears and wonder to see this lord o' the world 
sunk in humiliation, it has always seemed to me that there is 
in her demeanor — for she hardly speaks at all — a subtle 
mixture of woman's tenderness and woman's artifice. It 
stirs her pitying love to think that this man has lost an em- 
pire for her; but even in that moment she is half-conscious 
of what magic there is in her tears: • 

Eros. Sir, the Queen. 

Ant. O, whither hast thou led me, Egypt? See, 
How I convey my shame out of thine ej^es 
By looking back what I have left behind 
'Stroy'd in dishonour. 

Cleo. O my lord, my lord, 

Forgive my fearful sails! I little thouglit 
You would have followed. 

Ant. Egypt, thou knew'st too well 

My heart was to thy rudder tied by the strings, 
And thou shouldst tow me after. O'er my spirit 
Thy full supremacy thou knew'st, and that 
Thy beck might from the bidding of the gods 
Command me. 

Cleo. O, my pardon! 

Ant. Now I must 

To the young man send humble treaties, dodge 
And palter in the shifts of lowness; who 
With half the bulk o' the world play'd as I pleas'd, 



84 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Making and marring fortunes. You did know 
How much you were my conqueror; and that 
My sword, made weak by my affection, would 
Obey it on all cause. 

Cleo. Pardon, pardon! 

Ant. Fall not a tear, I say; one of them rates 
All that is won and lost. Give me a kiss. 
Even this repays me. 

After this Antony is never proof against her fascination 
while in her presence, even when he most suspects she may 
betray him. His last chance for heroic self-mastery vanishes 
when he confesses hopelessly to himself and to her that full 
supremacy that from the bidding of the gods themselves 
might now command him. He feels that he has sacrificed too 
much for his passion to abandon it now. His native force 
of will is weakening, and his shrewd judgment sunk so low 
that he can send a personal challenge to Octavius. "I see 
men's judgements," says Enobarbus, "are a parcel of their 
fortunes;" 

. . . That he should dream, 
Knowing all measures, the full Caesar will 
Answer his emptiness! Caesar, thou hast subdu'd 
His judgement too. 

No, not Caesar; but Cleopatra has. The last and lowest 
stage of his fall is reached when he has ocular proof of 
Cleopatra's willingness to make terms with Caesar (III, xiii, 
8i ff.) and yet, in spite of it, cannot, will not, break the 
chain that binds him to her. 

From that hour he does not really trust her an instant. 
He knows there is no truth or real affection in her attach- 
ment for him; but he will not think of it. It is too late now 
to retrieve his fate. The end is near. He sees his doom 
just in front of him ; but he will make the drama last a little 
longer, if he may, intoxicate for yet a little space his senses 
and his soul, and die in desperation under that enchantment. 
As he calls about him his followers that night for one last 
banquet, his words are all a-tremble with suppressed emotion 
and warm with that impulsive kindness of feeling which 
always attached men to him. It would be hard to find a more 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 85 

thrilling scene than that (IV, ii) ; it is the lightning before 
death. 

Next day he fights like a madman, and at its close he 
doesn't dare to let this temper of desperation cool and give 
him a moment's time for thought. As he comes in at night- 
fall from the world's great snare once more uncaught to 
meet the Queen, there is no hope or trust in his greeting, but 
the passion of desperate abandonment which he means shall 
never cool again. He will keep this sweet poison burning 
in his veins till the end comes : 

O thou day o' the world, 
Chain mine arm'd neck; leap thou, attire and all, 
Through proof of harness to my heart, and there 
Ride on the pants triumphing! 

My nightingale. 
We have beat them to their beds. What, girl ! though grey 
Do something mingle with our younger brown, yet ha' we 
A brain that nourishes our nerves, and can 
Get goal for goal of youth. 

But when on the morrow the Egyptian sails turn in flight 
and he sees that all is over, it is no surprise to him, and he 
leaps too quickly to the angry conclusion that Cleopatra has 
betrayed him. He cannot longer force himself to believe the 
sweet falsehood that she is true. He could never live 
steadily in that illusion; it seems he must die without it now. 
The fury of desperation has spent itself. Left alone for 
a little with the one follower that still is faithful to him 
he looks backward over his years, sees all the vast hopes 
of his life, the pageantry of his power dissolved and vanish- 
ing into vacancy. There are few passages in Shakespeare 
of more noble imagery or more moving pathos than this : 

Ant. Eros, thou yet behold'st me? 

Eros. Ay, noble lord. 

Ant. Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish ; 
A vapour sometime like a bear or lion, 
A tower'd citadel, a pendent rock, 
A forked mountain, or blue promontory 



86 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

With trees upjon 't, that nod unto the world, 

And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs; 

They are black vesper's pageants. 

Eros. Ay, my lord. 

Ant. That which is now a horse, even with a thought 
The rack dislimns and makes it indistinct, 
As water is in water. 

Eros. It does, my lord. 

Ant. My good knave Eros, now thy captain is 
Even such a body. Here I am Antony ; 
Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave. 
I made these wars for Egypt ; and the Queen, — 
Whose heart I thought I had, for she had mine, 
Which whilst it was mine had annex'd unto 't 
A million more, now lost, — she, Eros, has 
Pack'd cards with Caesar, and false-play'd my glory 
Unto an enemy's triumph. 
Nay, weep not, gentle Eros; there is left us 
Ourselves to end ourselves. 

But even the very last moments of this man Antony 
must be beguiled by the arts of the woman for whom he had 
wasted his life. As he speaks, the messenger enters with the 
false tidings that Cleopatra is dead — dead with his name 
upon her lips : 

Ant. Dead, then? 

Mar. Dead. 

Ant. Unarm, Eros; the long day's task is done, 
And we must sleep. . . . OfF, pluck off! 
The seven-fold shield of Ajax cannot keep 
The battery from my heart. . . . 

No more a soldier. Bruised pieces, go ; 

You have been nobly borne. — From me a while. — 

[Exit Eros. 
I will o'ertake thee, Cleopatra, and 
Weep for my pardon. So it must be, for now 
All length is torture ; since the torch is out, 
Lie down, and stray no farther. . . . 

Seal then, and all is done. 
Eros! — I come, my queen! — Eros! — Stay for me! 
Where souls do couch on flowers, we'll hand in hand. 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 87 

And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze. 

Dido and her -ffineas shall want troops, 

And all the haunt be ours. Come, Eros, Eros! 

No more heroic resolves, no more heroic regrets; now 
the end has come for this ruler of the world, he is already 
dead to all best worth the living, and he can raise his hopes 
only high enough to wish for a continuation in another world 
of that sweet slavery for which he had been content to barter 
all that is noblest in this one. That is the crowning pathos 
of his last gasp, — 

I am dying, Egypt, dying; only 
I here importune death a while, until 
Of many thousand kisses the poor last 
I lay upon thy lips. 

He has gained more than the whole world, but he has lost 
his own soul. 

About the closing hours of Cleopatra herself Shake- 
speare has thrown a pathetic majesty which makes us almost 
forget her weakness. Nothing in her life became her like 
the leaving it. The death of Antony breaks up the fountains 
of her woman's heart, and all the nobler elements of her 
passion for him cry out in her pathetic lament, as she re- 
covers from her swoon and finds him dead in her arms: 

Iras. Royal Egypt, 

Empress ! 

Char. Peace, peace, Iras! 

Cleo. No more but e'en a woman, and commanded 
By such poor passion as the maid that milks 
And does the meanest chares. It were for me 
To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods; 
To tell them that this world did equal theirs 
Till they had stolen our jewel. All's but naught; 

How do you, women? 
What, what! good cheer! Why, how now, Charmian! 
My noble girls! Ah, women, women, look. 
Our lamp is spent, it's out ! Good sirs, take heart. 
We'll bury him; and then, what's brave, what's noble, 
Let's do it after the high Roman fashion, 



88 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

And make Death proud to take us. Come, away; 
This case of that huge spirit now is cold, 
Ah, women, women! come; we have no friend 
But resolution and the briefest end. 

There is nothing left but death for her now. Had she 
not known that her arts would be wasted on Octavlus, she 
might not yet have despaired of life and further conquests; 
but knowing the uselessness of further attempts she does not 
think of them now. Her passionate grief and longing for 
Antony really seem to her the only motive of her resolve. 
But to die with calm resolution is impossible for Cleopatra, 
who has never done anything in her life except on passionate 
impulse. She strives to intensify her determination by going 
over again in thought all that majesty of Antony that had 
won her admiration; she forces herself to paint before her 
excited imagination in all its bitter details the shameful al- 
ternative of captivity: 

I 

Will not wait pinion'd at your master's court ; 

Nor once be chastis'd with the sober eye 

Of dull Octavia. Shall they hoist me up 

And show me to the shouting varletry 

Of censuring Rome? Rather a ditch in Egypt 

Be gentle grave unto me! 

Haughty and sensuous to the end, she will think the last 
dismissal easier if she may take it in company with her 
women and in circumstances of state that shall stimulate her 
imagination and heighten her emotions. She has lived 
proudly; she will die proudly: 

Now, Charmian! 
Show me, my women, like a queen. Go fetch 
My best attires; I am again for Cydnus 
To meet Mark Antony. 

The end is wonderful. At the supreme moment, her 
resolution falters and she rouses herself to that passionate 
longing for Antony which shall make death easy; she will 
claim credit for all that was best in her affection for him, 
she will dare to call him husband now: 



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 89 

Cleo. Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have 
Immortal longings in me. Now no more 
The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip. 
Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear 
Antony call; I see him rouse himself 
To praise my noble act; . . . Husband, I come! 
Now to that name my courage prove my title ! 
I am fire and air; my other elements 
I give to baser life. So; have you done? 
Come then, and take the last warmth of my lips. 
Farewell, kind Charmian; Iras, long farewell. 

[Kisses them. Iras falls and dies.} 
Have I the aspic in my lips? Dost fall? 
If thou and nature can so gently part, 
The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch, 
Which hurts, and is desir'd. Dost thou lie still? 
If thus thou vanishest, thou tell'st the world 
It is not worth leave-taking. 

This proves me base. 
If she first meet the curled Antony, 
He'll make demand of her, and spend that kiss 
Which is my heaven to have. Come, thou mortal wretch, 

[To an asp J which she applies to her breast.] 
With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate 
Of life at once untie. Poor venomous fool, 
Be angry, and dispatch. 

Yet even in that moment there is a last flash of the old de- 
fiant joy of conquest as she thinks how she has defrauded 
the great Caesar of his triumph, — 

O, couldst thou speak, 
That I might hear thee call great Caesar ass 
Unpolicied ! 

It is the last word of the serpent of old Nile, — the queen 
is dead; but the woman breathes again with that last word 
which tells what pangs and joys of motherhood had sanctified 
some hours even of this woman's life, and left memories that 
lingered longest as the light was fading out of her eyes : 

Cleg. Peace, peace! 

Dost thou not see my baby at my breast. 
That sucks the nurse asleep? 

Char. O, break! O, break! 



90 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Cleo. As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle, — 
O, Antony! — Nay, I will take thee too: 

[^Applying another asp to her arm.^ 
What should I stay — 

And as this "gorgeous tragedy in sceptered pall" 
sweeps by us to its solemn close, who can turn away without 
feeling that this human life of ours is too high a thing to be 
wasted upon pleasures however splendid, and that swift 
upon the heels of our proudest transgressions walk the 
stern-eyed retributions of offended law : 

The glories of our blood and state 
Are shadows, not substantial things; 

There is no armor against fate; 
Death lays his icy hands on kings: 

Only the actions of the just 

Smell sweet and blossom in their dust. 



THE WINTER'S TALE 

DURING the years of his greatest literary activity 
Shakespeare certainly spent most of his time in 
London. His home, indeed, was still in Stratford; 
his father and mother so long as they lived were there; his 
wife and children were there; and we may well believe his 
thoughts and his heart were often there too. Tradition re- 
cords that he always visited Stratford at least once a year; 
and it is certain that all through his dramatic career he 
planned to go back there some day, and spend his declining 
years in those scenes which must have been dear to him from 
boyhood, growing old among a family who might inherit 
his honors and his estates. He had purchased the most 
goodly house in this village and more than a hundred acres 
of broad sweeping meadow land in the country near by, and 
we can safely believe that after the first few years of the 
new century his visits to Stratford must have been longer 
and more frequent. At what time he quitted London for 
good and came home to live at New Place cannot now be de- 
termined; it may have been as early as 1609, it may possibly 
have been as late as the first months of 16 13. It seems to 
me most probable, on the whole, that it was early in 16 10. 
His fortunes had prospered; he was a wealthy man, most 
likely the wealthiest man of his native village. But it was 
with chastened feelings and something of that tempered joy 
that comes from hard experience and disappointment that 
Shakespeare, as one thinks, gave up the tumult and struggle 
of his career abroad and came home to accept and enjoy the 
lot that heaven had given him. One hope of his life was 
frustrate, — he had no son. His only boy, Hamnet, had 
died years before. The only grandchild that he lived to 
have in his arms was a girl, the child of his eldest daughter, 
Susanna; and now that his father was gone and two of his 

91 



92 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

brothers had died childless, he seems to have been left alone 
to bear a name that would die with him. But his wife was 
there, loyal to his love still, however much he may perchance 
have tried hers in some of the darker passages of his Lon- 
don life, and as dear to him now, I believe, in that afternoon 
time of reconciliation and of trust as when he wooed her in 
the early days of A Midsummer Night's Dream.^ His 
daughters were there, one living hard by her father's house, 
happily wedded and with a prattling infant just old enough 
to form some words of that great speech ennobled by the 
name of Shakespeare, the other still living at New Place 
with her mother, and just of that age her mother was when 
Will Shakespeare first came over the fields to Shottery. 
And all about was the same fair country, gently sloping hill 
and forest and meadows and hedges and slow-flowing river, 
that landscape which had been always in his thought and of 
which we have so often caught glimpses in his poetry. 

It was in such surroundings, in the quiet of these familiar 
scenes, that Shakespeare, as we believe, wrote three plays, 
the last written entirely by him, — Cymbeline, The Tempest, 
The JVinter^s Tale. These last plays entirely his own are 
in some respects unlike anything else of Shakespeare's; 
and every one must feel that they grew out of the grave 
calm, the domestic peace of his later years. The great ques- 
tions of life are solved or put aside as insoluble; the great 
passions are calmed. The plays are not tragedies, but end 
in some kind of reconciliation and peace. Yet they are not 
comedies; the humor is grave and wise, sometimes for a lit- 
tle delightfully roguish, but no longer dominant or obtru- 
sive, pervading the whole rather than making itself felt at 
any one point. As the plays are each based on some roman- 
tic tale, they may perhaps best be called Romances, rather 
than either Tragedies or Comedies. Yet their temper is 
hardly romantic. There is a mellow, autumnal feeling about 

* This refers to a charming theory it was Professor Winchester's humor 
to suggest in his lecture on Midsummer Night's Dream, — that the play was 
in substance an actual dream of Shakespeare's one night after he had been 
to see Anne Hathaway. The date determined for the play is, of course, 
much later. [L. B. G.] 



THE WINTER'S TALE 93 

them. All three turn mostly upon the strength and truth 
of the domestic affections; and they may be called, more 
truly than any other dramas of Shakespeare, plays of home. 
The brightness of early imagination is toned into the softer 
hues of reality; the ardor of youthful passion has cooled. If 
there is love-making, it is described not now with the rapture 
of a lover, but with the wise and tender solicitude of a 
father. It isn't Romeo and Juliet now, but Florlzel and 
Perdlta. And besides this general tone of grave serenity 
and conciliation, one may notice three more specific pecu- 
llaritl-es of these latest plays. In each one there Is a central 
character sorely tried by some misunderstanding or wrong, 
suffering patiently and winning back at last by forgiveness 
and unwavering moral strength the trust that was always 
deserved. In two of the plays this character Is a wife 
shamefully mistrusted by her husband, yet true to him and 
true to herself through it all, — Imogen and Hermlone. 
Secondly, the plays are almost the first ones In which we find 
childhood and early youth depicted with deep and yearning 
paternal sympathy. Miranda, Perdlta, and those two boys 
in Cymbeline, — Shakespeare's thoughts seem to dwell upon 
these charming young people with almost pathetic concern. 
And then, thirdly, there are In all three of these plays some 
exquisite country scenes, glimpses of hill, forest, or garden 
which seem to show with what quiet delight the eye of the 
great master was feeding upon the rural beauty around his 
home. 

It would be hard to say which of the three plays Is best; 
each has its especial charm. Cymheline has that matchless 
character, Imogen, the perfect flower of womanhood in 
Shakespeare. In The Tempest the wise and noble figure of 
Prospero seems to me to represent more nearly than any 
other the character of Shakespeare himself in the maturity 
of his later years; I am persuaded that the more Prospero is 
studied, the stronger will be the conviction that, In many re- 
spects, he is the great magician, Shakespeare himself. But 
I have chosen to close this brief series of lectures with some 
remarks upon The printer's Tale, partly because It Is prob- 



94 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

ably the last entire play that Shakespeare ever wrote, but 
principally because it seems to me to exemplify better than 
either of the others all the peculiarities I have mentioned, 
and because it is the one of the three that I feel most certain 
must have been inspired by Shakespeare's renewed family 
life at Stratford. I must believe that Shakespeare's portrait 
of Hermione is a tribute to that wifely affection which I fear 
he may have put sadly to the proof but which was true to 
him through all. In Perdita I fancy we may see some traits 
of Judith Shakespeare as she seemed to her father's partial 
eyes; and when Shakespeare wrote such lines as these, can 
you doubt of whom he was thinking? 

Looking on the lines 
Of my boy's face, methoughts I did recoil 
Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreech'd 
In my green velvet coat, my dagger muzzl'd, 
Lest it should bite its master, and so prove. 
As ornaments oft do, too dangerous. 
How like, methought, I then was to this kernel, 
This squash, this gentleman. Mine honest friend. 
Will you take eggs for money? 

Mam. No, my lord, I'll fight. 

Leon. You will! Why, happy man be 's dole! My brother. 
Are you so fond of your young prince as we 
Do seem to be of ours? 

Most certainly he had in his memory then that boy of his, 
missed more than ever now, — the boy, Hamnet, who died 
when a lad of eleven, some fifteen years before, and left a 
long sorrow in his father's heart. That sorrow speaks re- 
peatedly in this play, if I read between its lines aright; as in 
that touching outburst of Leontes in the last Act when 
Pauline mentions this young Mamillius, who too had then 
been dead, you remember, some fifteen years, 

Prithee, no more; cease. Thou knowst 
He dies to me again when talk'd of. 

And as to the homely country folk, the shepherd and the 
clown, and Mopsa, and Dorcas, surely they are all of good 



THE WINTER'S TALE 95 

Stratford peasantry, and akin to Shakespeare's early Strat- 
ford friends, Bottom, and Quince, and Snug, and the rest. 
Perdita's pretty garden was at Shottery I know, for it is 
blooming still and I have picked her flowers there myself. 

The plot of The Winter's Tale, like that of As You Like 
It, Shakespeare borrowed from one of those long meander- 
ing romances that were so popular in his youth. Like Lodge 
and other of his fellow dramatists, Greene wrote a number 
of long prose romances, through which his charming lyrics 
are scattered. One of these romances called Pandosto was 
the source of the plot of The Winter's Tale. The first three 
Acts of the drama, up to the supposed death of the Queen 
follow the romance very closely, — so closely, indeed, that it 
would seem that Shakespeare must have read it very re- 
cently, or have written with it before him, — but the last half 
of the drama diverges more widely from the romance. In 
Greene's story the Queen actually dies, and at the close, the 
King, her husband, in despair poisons himself; the restora- 
tion of Hermione, the device of the statue, and the delight- 
ful ending of the play are all original with Shakespeare. So 
also are the three persons, Paulina, Autolycus, and the Shep- 
herd's son. But of course here, as almost everywhere, 
Shakespeare owes to his authorities nothing more than the 
outline of a plot; the characters of the play are of his own 
creating, and its general tone is entirely different from that 
of the romance. 

In no one of his plays does Shakespeare show a more val- 
iant disregard of all restrictions of fact and rule. In de- 
fiance of all laws of dramatic unity he goes so far as to 
divide his play sharply into two parts, and put an interval 
of sixteen years between them. Perdita is an infant of days 
at the close of the Third Act, and a lass of sixteen years at 
the beginning of the Fourth. He has, moreover, crowded 
the play with anachronisms and all sorts of impossible geog- 
raphy and history. On the mainland of Sicily we have a 
King who receives a wife from the Emperor of Russia, a 
message from the Delphic oracle, and a statue from Giulio 
Romano; while in the island of Bohemia, besides most 



96 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

charming royal people in disguise, we have shepherds who 
reckon their tods of wool in pounds, shiUings, and pence, and 
Puritans who sing psalms to hornpipes, — a practice which 
I grieve to say their descendants outside of Bohemia have 
not yet quite given up. 

Perhaps it was in recognition of such romantic liberties 
that Shakespeare called his play a Winter's Tale, as he had 
once before called a play of pure fancy a Dream; and you 
remember that Father Time is made to come in as a chorus 
with some words of explanation and apology for the great 
gap he has made between the Third and Fourth Acts. But 
for these violations of formal accuracy, which would have 
vexed the righteous soul of a Ben Jonson, Shakespeare never 
cared much, and as he grew older he cared less and less. 

The story of the first half of the play is very briefly told. 
Leontes, King of Sicily, suspects his wife, Hermione, of in- 
fidelity with Polixenes, King of Bohemia, who, after a long 
visit at his court, is now just going home. The base sus- 
picion once fixed in the mind of Leontes, nothing can dis- 
abuse him of it. One of his trusted advisers discloses his 
delusion to Polixenes and hastens the Bohemian King out of 
Sicily. This only increases the insane jealousy of Leontes 
and convinces him that he is the object of a conspiracy at 
home. He mercilessly orders that the infant daughter of 
Hermione shall be exposed to death in some remote and 
desert place, and hurries the Queen herself, yet in her moth- 
er's weakness, to a form of trial before himself, where he is 
determined to inflict the harshest penalty, even in spite of a 
message from the Delphic oracle which pronounces her inno- 
cent. But before the dread sentence can fall, word comes 
that the prince, only son of Leontes, is dead for very grief 
and shame at the disgrace that is come upon his mother. 
Hermione herself at this tidings swoons away, and is shortly 
after reported dead. But this double grief opens the eyes 
of Leontes to his own cruel folly, and in bitter repentance he 
vows, thereafter, once a day to visit the chapel where they 
He. "And tears shed there shall be my recreation." 

The jealousy of Leontes, at first reading, seems sudden 



THE WINTER'S TALE 97 

and unprovoked. This is due in part to the necessary con- 
ciseness of dramatic structure which makes it impossible to 
do more than suggest the causes of a passion like this. Yet 
a careful reading of the play will show, I think, that Shake- 
speare has made no mistake, and that the infatuation of 
Leontes is neither inexplicable nor unnatural. For the jeal- 
ousy of Leontes is not, like the jealousy of Othello, an alien 
conviction slowly forced upon an open and confiding nature 
by what seems irresistible evidence. Leontes is naturally of 
a suspicious, mistrustful temper. There are, to be sure, 
some noble things about him: he is upright and honest in 
purpose, and, if he is stern to others, he would be quite as 
harsh to himself as to any one else; his father's love for 
Mamillius and his fond memories of all his wedded life with 
his Queen show how deep are his affections. But the poison- 
ous juice of jealousy and moodiness taints his blood by 
nature. With a wife more vivacious in manner and of less 
calm self-command his life would long before have been em- 
bittered; but Hermione knew his temper very well, and her 
conduct has been always so wise and loving that not even one 
so exacting as Leontes could find anything to shake his confi- 
dence. As it is, his love for Hermione is so precious to him 
that there is a kind of selfish exclusiveness in it, and a mor- 
bid fear that any one else shall share her smiles. He is 
jealous even of her friendship, and doesn't like to have her 
express any high regard for any one but himself. I suppose 
this is the reason that, while he is trying to persuade Polix- 
enes to stay longer, she stands by quietly without a word, 
until Leontes asks her to join her persuasions to his. And 
you will note that he does this with a kind of uneasy feeling 
that he is sharing with his friend favors that belong pecu- 
liarly to himself, and a fear that Hermione will be too per- 
suasive. As he listens to the playful yet dignified urgency of 
her invitation, and sees that Polixenes will yield and stay, he 
is vexed to find that she seems as attractive to any one else as 
she does to him; and I think it is a firm truth of nature that 
this should turn his thought into bitter sweet reminiscence of 
all her winsomeness in the past. At last he asks : 



98 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Is he won yet ? 

Her. He'll stay, my lord. 

Leon. At my request he would not. 

Hermione, my dearest, thou never spok'st 
To better purpose. 

Her. Never? 

Leon. Never, but once. 

Her. What! have I twice said well? When was 't before? 
I prithee tell me; cram 's with praise. . . . 

My last good deed was to entreat his stay ; 

What was my first? It has an elder sister, 

Or I mistake you. O, would her name were Grace! 

But once before I spoke to the purpose; when? 

Nay, let me have 't ; I long. 

Leon. Why, that was when 

Three crabbed months had sour'd themselves to death, 
Ere I could make thee open thy white hand 
And clap thyself my love ; then didst thou utter 
"I am yours for ever." 

You see in these last words he is dwelling on that sweet 
olden time with a haunting mistrust of Hermione, and a 
vague feeling that her delay implied some lack of entire de- 
votion to him even then. The germ of jealousy once planted 
in the mind of Leontes all the subsequent growth of that 
dire disease is natural enough. It is not a noble, pitying 
jealousy, like that of Othello, which thinks most not of itself 
but of the truth and purity debased, and moans over that, "O 
the pity of it, lago, the pity of it." The jealousy of Leontes 
is selfish, and inexorable towards its victim. As he has no 
facts on which to base his disbelief, it is impossible to 
convince him of his error; a thousand vile suspicions crowd 
his imagination and furnish all the evidence that his jealous 
temper craves. All the discretion of the Queen seems to him 
now only evidence of her craft. The sudden departure of 
Polixenes after his promise to stay he interprets as a con- 
firmation of his doubts, and his infatuation grows into a 
flaming passion at once. Any word in defense of Hermione 
or question of his justice drives him into a rage; and if he 
sends to inquire of the oracle it is only to satisfy the minds 
of others; for himself he needs no further proof: 



THE WINTER'S TALE 99 

I have dispatch'd in post 
To sacred Delphos, to Apollo's temple, 

Though I am satisfi'd and need no more 
Than what I know, yet shall the oracle 
Give rest to the minds of others, such as he 
Whose ignorant credulity will not 
Come up to the truth. 

That is, he means to use the authority of the oracle if it ap- 
prove his intentions; if it do not, he will defy it. 

Yet jealousy so violent is naturally somewhat transient, 
— a passionate mood, rather than a settled, cold distrust. 
Leontes is too obstinate and wilful to give up his delusion 
soon, but we feel that he will sometime come to regret it. 
Even when the trial comes on, his first frenzy of conviction 
has passed; and though he rejects the message of the oracle 
as he had before resolved he would, yet when the tidings of 
his son's death are brought in and Hermione swoons before 
him, the cruel illusion dissolves ; with the mother of his boy 
dying there before him he sees his baseness, — 

I have too much believ'd mine own suspicion. 
Beseech you, tenderly apply to her 
Some remedies for life. Apollo pardon 
My great profaneness 'gainst thine oracle! 

His repentance is as deep and as passionate as his sin has 
been. He has no mercy for himself, — "I have deserv'd All 
tongues to talk their bitt'rest." It is, indeed, a solemn 
truth, as he felt, that a great injustice such as he had wrought 
can never be atoned for; but in the sixteen weary years of 
solitary life that followed we feel that he conquers at last 
his native jealousy of temper, and gains, by that long suffer- 
ing, a charity, a calmness, and a self-command which make 
him better worthy such a wife as Hermione. 

Among the whole company of wedded wives in Shake- 
speare's world, some perhaps may be more beautiful, or 
more engaging than Hermione, but certainly there is no one 
more noble. She is every inch a queen, and yet a woman first 
of all. I think always of Wordworth's lines, 



100 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

A perfect woman, nobly planned, 
To warn, to comfort, and command. 

There is always a certain quietness and austerity in her de- 
meanor. She lacks something of that tenderness and anima- 
tion which combine with strength to make Imogen the crown 
of womanhood in Shakespeare. Hermione's affections are 
deep, but they are still and not much prone to outward 
expression; one who did not know her well might think her 
cold. Even in her most familiar converse there is a certain 
gracious dignity which betokens perfect calmness and self- 
command. I think this queenly courtesy is well shown in 
the very first words we hear her speak, as, at the suggestion 
of her husband, she invites Polixenes to stay with them 
longer. The sweetness and gentleness of her character are 
seen best, perhaps, in her mother's love for her children; 
and I think it is a most admirable stroke of Shakespeare's 
art to show us that pretty bedtime scene with the boy, Ma- 
millius (II, i). It is upon this touching scene that Leontes 
breaks in with his savage charge, — "Give me the boy: I'm 
glad you did not nurse him . . . Bear the boy hence ; he shall 
not come about her." The terrible accusation astounds her; 
but she does not sink under it. Her white lips tremble, but 
she doesn't lose her calm self-command as she answers, — 

Should a villain say so, 
The most replenish'd villain in the world, 
He were as much more villain: you, my lord, 
Do but mistake. 

As her husband goes on to load her with reproaches, his 
words burn to her heart's core, but she doesn't weep or 
swoon. To the profoundest depths of her great woman's 
heart she feels what an insult this is; but even at that mo- 
ment her keenest pain seems to be not for herself, but for her 
husband. To think that he, Leontes, standing there, the 
father of her Mamillius and of her child unborn, can so far 
mistake her ! Yet she does not loathe him, but pities rather, 
and you will go far to find nobler words than those with 
which she interrupts his wild accusation : 



THE WINTER'S TALE loi 

No, by my life, 
Privy to none of this. How will this grieve you, 
When you shall come to clearer knowledge, that 
You thus have publish'd me ! Gentle, my lord, 
You scarce can right me throughly then to say 
You did mistake. 

It is only when under some such great trial that a character 
like that of Hermione shows all its wonderful strength and 
sweetness. The suspicion of her husband is a strange, un- 
utterable wrong; she feels it as a nature less deep and calm 
never could feel it. All her womanhood protests against it. 
Yet she bears it without either weak submission or loud com- 
plaint. She has not been much used to seek her own happi- 
ness and she can do without it now. She has the still ap- 
provings of a good conscience; and she has the fortitude that 
comes from long habit of self-sacrifice and self-command. 
She can suffer and be strong. "Good my lords," says she 
to the nobles as she is to be led away to prison: 

Good my lords, 
I am not prone to weeping, as our sex 
Commonly are, the want of which vain dew 
Perchance shall dry your pities; but I have 
That honourable grief lodg'd here which burns 
Worse than tears drown. Beseech you all, my lords, 
With thoughts so qualified as your charities 
Shall best instruct you, measure me; and so 
The King's will be perform'd ! 

. . . Adieu, my lord. 
I never wish'd to see you sorry ; now 
I trust I shall. 

This calm-eyed greatness of soul, this pathetic dignity move 
our deepest loyalty, and stir in us a kind of reverence. 
There is an awful beauty in such still, unshaken virtue. 

The plea of Hermione at her trial is certainly one of the 
most affecting passages in Shakespeare. It is the union of 
intense emotion with perfect calm and self-possession that 
makes her words go straight to our hearts. One can see the 
whole scene: — The dark, uneasy-eyed Leontes, tormented 



I02 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

by his jealousy, and tormented the more because he has a 
haunting feeling that he may be wrong; the ring of pitying 
nobles, the tears almost forcing themselves into their eyes, 
and their hands playing nervously with the swords they can 
hardly keep undrawn, and, in the center, the tall pale statue- 
like figure of Hermione, speaking slowly those plain noble 
words, every one from the bottom of her deep woman's 
heart. She will only assert her innocence ; she will not con- 
descend to parley and argument. Nay she would hardly con- 
sent to speak at all for the sake of her own life, or even her 
own fame, — they are in the keeping of a higher court than 
that; but her mother's heart is almost breaking to think that 
the boy she loves and the babe just born must bear the 
stigma of her shame. It is for them she speaks: 

for honour, 
'Tis a derivative from me to mine, 
And only that I stand for. I appeal 
To your own conscience, sir, before Polixenes 
Came to your court, how I was in your grace, 
How merited to be so; since he came. 
With what encounter so uncurrent I 
Have strain'd to appear thus; if one jot beyond 
The bound of honour, or in act or will 
That way inclining, hard'ned be the hearts 
Of all that hear me, and my near'st of kin 
Cry fie upon my grave! 

More than mistress of 
Which comes to me in name of fault, I must not 
At all acknowledge. For Polixenes, 
With whom I am accus'd, I do confess 
I lov'd him as in honour he requir'd. 
With such a kind of love as might become 
A lady like me, with a love even such. 
So and no other, as yourself commanded; 
Which not to have done I think had been in me 
Both disobedience and ingratitude 
To you and toward your friend. . . . 

Sir, spare your threats. 
The bug which you would fright me with I seek; 
To me can life be no commodity. 



THE WINTER'S TALE 103 

The crown and comfort of my life, your favour, 

I do give lost; for I do feel it gone, 

But know not how it went. My second joy 

And first-fruits of my body, from his presence 

I am barr'd, like one infectious. My third comfort, 

Starr'd most unluckily, is from my breast, 

The innocent milk in it most innocent mouth, 

Hal'd out to murder; ... 

. . . lastly, hurried 
Here to this place, i' the open air, before 
I have got strength of limit. Now, my liege, 
Tell me what blessings I have here alive. 
That I should fear to die? Therefore proceed. 
But yet hear this: mistake me not; no life, 
I prize it not a straw, but for mine honour, 
Which I would free, — if I shall be condemn'd 
Upon surmises, all proofs sleeping else 
But what your jealousies awake, I tell you 
'Tis rigour and not law. ... 

As she ends, and knows that all Is hopeless, she murmurs, "O 
that my father were alive," 

and here beholding 
His daughter's trial ! that he did but see 
The flatness of my misery, yet with eyes 
Of pity, not revenge! 

Yet all this she could have endured, — the suspicions, the 
charge, the sentence, the reversal of the oracle, — all of it 
her firm determination might have borne up under ; but when 
at that moment comes the news that her boy, her first-born, 
is dead for very grief and pity of that sorrow he cannot un- 
derstand, — it is too much. Her mother's heart breaks; she 
swoons away, and is carried out for dead. 

One should have a word for Paulina, who champions the 
cause of Hermione so bravely, if not so wisely. Paulina is 
a kind of mixture of Portia and Mrs. Caudle. She has a 
very noble and generous heart, and — a tongue. She is one 
of those persons who think the truth should be spoken at all 
times, and who is never afraid to speak it. It is a real com- 
fort to us to hear her tell Leontes what she thinks of him, 



104 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

but he takes little comfort from it, and what is worse he 
probably takes little profit from it either; for Paulina is cer- 
tainly not always judicious in her utterances. Her bravery 
in forcing herself into the presence of Leontes with the babe 
of Hermione does more credit to her heart than her head; 
for she might have known that at such a time nothing would 
be so sure to exasperate him. 

Paul. Good my liege, I come; 

And, I beseech you, hear me. . . . 

I say, I come 
From your good queen. 

Leon. Good queen! 

Paul. Good queen, my lord. 

Good queen ; I say good queen ; 
And would by combat make her good, so were I 
A man, the worst about you. 

Leon. Force her hence. 

Paul. Let him that makes but trifles of his eyes 
First hand me. On mine own accord I'll off. 
But first I'll do my errand. The good queen, 
For she is good, hath brought you forth a daughter; 
Here 't is; commends it to your blessing. 

Leon. I'll ha' thee burnt. 

Paul. I care not ; 

It is an heretic that makes the fire, 
Not she which burns in 't. I'll not call you tyrant; 
But this most cruel usage of your queen. 
Not able to produce more accusation 
Than your own weak-hing'd fancy, something savours 
Of tyranny, and will ignoble make you, 
Yea, scandalous to the world. 

I pray you, do not push me; I'll be gone. 
Look to your babe, my lord: 

Paulina is not likely to be over-tender in speech to any one. 
"If I prove honey-mouthed, let my tongue blister," says she; 
she was in no danger of that trouble, I think. She is plainly 
one of those ladies who set a high estimate upon the power 
of emphatic advice. She doesn't think that the truth ought 
to hurt any one's feelings, and isn't over careful about a 



THE WINTER'S TALE 105 

"sweet reasonableness" of manner. Yet those are often very 
bright truths that fly like sparks from the hot heart of 
Paulina, and her devotion to Hermione is so entire and un- 
selfish that we cannot withhold our admiration from it. A 
brave, kindly, sound-hearted woman, — though perhaps one 
is a little glad she is in his neighbor's family. The highest 
proof at once of her self-forgetfulness and her self-com- 
mand is that for sixteen long years she was the companion 
of Hermione's solitude and never once betrayed it, — and 
that with her gift of speech. I'm not sure but this is the 
greatest impossibility in the play. Shakespeare, however, 
has been careful to remind us in the last Act that whenever, 
in those years, she found silence over-burdensome, she could 
take opportunity to stir up the gift that was in her by put- 
ting Leontes in remembrance of his past, and keeping alive 
in him a wholesome feeling of penitence. And then it must 
be noted, that Paulina really found a kind of satisfaction in 
the management of this affair. For such women as she are 
never content unless they can load upon themselves a burden 
of other people's cares, and they are sure to find or make 
some one miserable enough to put a pleasant strain upon 
their sympathies. And I suppose that was why when 
Hermione is united to her husband again and that 
charge removed from Paulina, Leontes advises her to 
remarry and recommends Camillo to her care ; he knew that 
such a talent for anxiety could not safely go unem- 
ployed. 

With the close of the Third Act the tragic part of the 
play ends. Sixteen years have passed away when we enter, 
in the next Act, that pleasant pastoral land of Bohemia, 
which I think must lie not far from the forest of Arden. 
The Fourth Act is an idyl. The babe of Hermione, Perdita, 
the lost one, has been found and has grown to the verge of 
womanhood in this delightful country, under the care of a 
most exemplary old Shepherd and his wife whom she re- 
gards as her parents. And now she is wooed by the son of 
King Polixenes, Prince Florizel, who is too frank and good 
to keep anything from Perdita, but will conceal from every 



io6 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

one else his noble birth, and so comes to pay court to this 
charming lass in the guise of a shepherd. 

The first stranger we meet, however, in this pleasant 
country is a character succinctly described in the list of dra- 
matis personae as "Autolycus — a rogue." 

"When daffodils begin to peer, 

With heigh! the doxy over the dale. 
Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year; 

For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale. 

"The white sheet bleaching on the hedge, 

With heigh ! the sweet birds, O, how they sing! 
Doth set my pugging tooth on edge ; 

For a quart of ale is a dish for a king." 

I think it was a professor of Moral Philosophy, — Wilson 
of Edinburgh, — who said he thanked God that he had never 
lost his liking for bad company. Shakespeare, I take it, must 
have had a similar feeling. I'm sure that in the quiet and 
freedom of his outdoor life at Stratford he must have found 
such a precious vagabond as Autolycus a delightful recrea- 
tion, even if some of the family linen did sometimes disap- 
pear mysteriously. For this last of Shakespeare's delectable 
rogues has a laughing, boyish, roving temper which must 
have something seductive in it to any man not altogether 
hidebound in conventions and proprieties. He appeals to 
that native impulse to vagrancy which we all feel now and 
then. We never get beyond a disposition to play truant 
sometimes from the duties and dignities of life. 

As to the thievish propensities of Autolycus they are so 
natural to him, that you can hardly blame him any more 
than you can the robin that takes the cherries from your 
trees. The warmth of spring and the song of birds stirs in 
him an instinct for roving and roguing, and he really seems 
not quite responsible for his small knaveries. Society has 
never been able to force its conventions upon him; he is still 
in a state of nature. There's nothing criminal about him; 
he doesn't accept your ideas of property, that's all. He has 
tried some more methodical ways of life in his time, — has 



THE WINTER'S TALE 107 

been an ape-bearer, a process-server, has carried about a 
puppet-show of the Prodigal Son, and, with a desperate re- 
solve to settle in life, once married a tinker's widow: but all 
these attempts put too much restraint on the natural freedom 
of his disposition, and he has now subsided into plain rogue. 
But he is a most picturesque and versatile rogue. "He will 
sing you several tunes faster than you'll tell money," and 
when he chooses to turn peddler he will cry his ribbons and 
broideries till "you would think a smock was a she-angel, he 
so chants to the sleeve-hand and the work about the square 
on t. 

"Lawn as white as driven snow; 
Cyprus black as e'er was crow; 

Bugle-bracelet, necklace amber, 
Perfume for a lady's chamber; 

Come buy of me, come; come buy, come buy; 
Buy, lads, or else your lasses cry. 
Come buy." 

As an instance of his light-fingered exploits recall the scene 
in which the Shepherd's son falls a victim to his arts (IV, iii, 
38-121). Evidently the exploits of Autolycus are prompted 
not so much by a love of larceny and lucre as by a love of 
fun and frolic; and I'm afraid it's quite hopeless to expect 
any amendment from him. When at last he stumbles into 
good luck, and sees that he might make his fortune as a 
courtier, he finds that he has still too strong a dash of the 
old life in him to care for any other and we are left to infer 
that he ends his career in the profession of his father, — "a 
snapper-up of unconsidered trifles." 

All the exquisite pastoral beauty of this Fourth Act, the 
homely shepherd's truth, the rustic mirth, and song, and 
dance, and flowers, they all only form a background and set- 
ting for Perdita who moves among her simple flowers, her- 
self the sweetest flower of all. Perdita is quite the most 
charming girl I ever met — in books. No wonder Florizel 
is in love with her; I'm sure I've been ever since I was about 



io8 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

his age. In the first place, she is so fair. No one sees her 
without some sudden word of admiration. King Polixenes, 
who has something of a grudge against her for having won 
the heart of his boy, cannot avoid exclaiming, "This is the 
prettiest low-born lass that ever ran on the green-sward." 
"Good sooth, she is the queen of curds and cream," says old 
Camillo; "I should leave grazing, were I of your flock, and 
only live by gazing." When she comes to Sicily, the gentle- 
man that announces her arrival can hardly keep his enthu- 
siasm within bounds, "Ay, the most peerless piece of earth, 
I think, that e'er the sun shone bright on." And King 
Leontes himself when first he sees her, not knowing she is 
his daughter, can hardly take his eyes from her face. 

And to this beauty she adds a natural grace, an artless- 
ness, a delicacy which are quite bewitching. It is as if the 
sweet pastoral beauties of nature amid which she has grown 
up had somehow embodied themselves in her, and lent to 
her a grace to mold the maiden's form by silent sympathy. 
So that Florizel's praise seems no lover's flattery, but only 
an involuntary tribute to her artless charm of demeanor : 

What you do 
Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet, 
I'd have you do it ever; when you sing, 
I'd have you buy and sell so, so give alms, 
Pray so; and for the ord'ring your affairs, 
To sing them too. When you do dance, I wish you 
A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do 
Nothing but that; move still, still so, 
And own no other function. Each your doing, 
So singular in each particular, 
Crowns what you are doing in the present deeds, 
That all your acts are queens. 

She is but a girl yet, hardly in the spring of womanhood; 
and there is a delightful youth and freshness in all she says 
and does. She accepts the love of Florizel with a girlish 
pride mixed with sweet timidity. And in truth both lovers 
are so young and innocent that at the first word of endear- 
ment from either, the true blood looks out at the cheeks of 
both. But Perdita is her mother's own daughter, and in all 



THE WINTER'S TALE 109 

her young gayety there is a certain quietness and elegance 
which give an added charm to her beauty. 'Nothing she 
does or says but smacks of something greater than herself.' 
Without the slightest trace of affectation or prudery, there is 
yet a still maidenly dignity of manner in all her lightest con- 
versation with Florizel which is indescribably fascinating. It 
is this which makes her seem to Florizel so pure and high, 
and puts into his affection that tinge of reverence which 
there must ever be in any worthy love of man for woman. 
This modest dignity much becomes her when she presides at 
the sheep-shearing festival. She blushes to see herself in the 
fantastic attire in which she has been prankt up for the oc- 
casion, and timidly shrinks from assuming the foremost 
place in the rustic company; but at the bidding of the old 
Shepherd she takes upon herself the hostess-ship of the day, 
and welcomes her guests with a quiet grace that wins our 
hearts as surely as it did Florizel's. 

And then how perfectly truthful and conscientious she 
is. The dear maid cannot abide anything that reminds her 
of artifice or falsity. You remember her pretty conceit about 
her flowers (IV, iv, 79 ff.). She cannot follow the reason- 
ing of Polixenes, indeed she doesn't try to, and cuts it short 
by courteously assenting to his conclusion; but she is of the 
same opinion still. However you may argue about it she 
knows she cannot like those flowers which do not grow as 
nature meant them to, and she'll not put dibble in the earth 
to set one slip of them. She loves truth and hates logic, — 
true little woman that she is. And then as she turns to 
Florizel and her other younger guests who are not strangers, 
her shyness vanishes, and she gives them their flowers with 
such dainty words of poetry as add new beauty and new 
fragrance to her gift, and show how delicate is the imagina- 
tion and how exquisite the poetic sense of the fair young 
giver : 

Now, my fair'st friend, 
I would I had some flowers o' the spring that might 
Become your time of day ; and yours, and yours, 
• ••••<•• 



no AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

. . . O Proserpina, 
For the flowers now, that frighted thou let'st fall 
From Dis's waggon! daffodils, 
That come before the swallow dares, and take 
The winds of March with beauty ; violets dim, 
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes 
Or Cytherea's breath ; . . . 

. . . bold oxlips and 
The crown imperial ; lilies of all kinds, 
The flower-de-luce being one! O, these I lack. 
To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend, 
To strew him o'er and o'er ! 

Nowhere In all the gardens of the poets will you find a fairer 
nosegay than that or a sweeter maid to pluck it. Did you 
notice that line about the violet? I do not believe that you 
can find anywhere else in our language or any other a de- 
scription of the color of the wood violet — palest blue just 
passing into creamy white — at once so faithful and so 
daintily poetic as that, — "Violets dim, but sweeter than the 
lids of Juno's eyes." 

And when King Polixenes throws off his disguise, and 
with a harshness that he finds it rather hard to assume be- 
fore such innocence and truth commands the young lovers to 
separate forever, then you shall see that this girl Perdita 
has already something of her mother's queenly loftiness of 
spirit, her mother's unselfishness, and her mother's power 
of still and patient endurance : 

Even here undone! 
I was not much afeard; for once or twice 
I was about to speak, and tell him plainly 
The self-same sun that shines upon his court 
Hides not his visage from our cottage, but 
Looks on alike. Will 't please you, sir, be gone? 
I told you what would come of this. Beseech you. 
Of your own state take care. This dream of mine, — 
Being now awake, I'll queen it no inch farther, 
But milk my ewes and weep. 

How often have I told you 't would be thus! 



THE WINTER'S TALE iii 

How often said, my dignity would last 
But 'till 't were known! 

Young Florizel, whose pure and chivalrous love for Perdita 
has made a man of him, now shows in his emergency of 
what stuff he is made, and takes the hand of Perdita to front 
their adverse fates with a firm and calm decision worthy the 
son of a king. "Lift up thy looks," he says to Perdita, 
and then : 

From my succession wipe me, father; I 
Am heir to my affection. 

Cam. This is desperate, sir. 

Flo. So call it; but it does fulfill my vow; 
I needs must think it honesty. Camillo, 
Not for Bohemia, nor the pomp that may 
Be thereat gleaned, for all the sun sees or 
The close earth wombs or the profound seas hides 
In unknown fathoms, will I break my oath 
To this my fair belov'd. 

Where will you find a more true and goodly pair of young 
lovers than these? Shakespeare has placed them amid peace- 
ful scenes of beauty and innocence, too young to have known 
as yet the sorrows and the hardships of the world, and look- 
ing forward with steadfast eye to all the trouble before 
them, calm in the sense of mutual love and faith. I always 
fancy that Shakespeare dwelt long and lovingly over this 
scene when he wrote it, looking backward it may be upon 
his own vanished youth, looking it may be with a father's 
tender pride upon his own daughter now blooming into 
womanhood, and feeling deep in his heart a yearning sense 
of that young love and purity not yet brought near to any 
great sin or any great sorrow, and of that calm young con- 
fidence of spirit not yet buffeted and broken by the smitings 
of life. Sure I am that no man can set in his imagination that 
fair picture of early love and purity without finding in it 
forever a true refection of soul. 

The last Act of this Winter's Tale contains only the 
story of the finding of the lost and the knitting up again of 



112 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

the ties that had been severed so long. No one of Shake- 
speare's plays, I think, is rounded to such a perfect close, so 
satisfying all our most generous feelings and leaving us with 
a long-drawn breath of deep and glad content. It is as if 
the great dramatist would end his last work, as he hoped 
to end his life, in the full quiet joy of home. 

Perdita and Florlzel, after some aid from that good 
rogue Autolycus, and a variety of adventures doubtless quite 
possible in Bohemia, reach the court of Sicily and throw 
themselves upon the protection of King Leontes. Florizel's 
father. King Polixenes, follows hard after them, and arrives 
just in time to be present at the opening by the old Shepherd 
of that precious fardel which contains the proof that Perdita 
verily is the lost daughter of Leontes and Hermione. The 
father takes his child to his heart with fast-flowing tears in 
which joy of the present and sorrow for the past are 
strangely mingled; the two old Kings, who have not seen 
each other since that dark day sixteen years before when 
they parted in suspicion and anger, now take hands again 
with silent tears of forgiveness and reconciliation, blessing 
their united children, while they think with full hearts upon 
that queenly mother who stood with them when last they 
were in this hall together. Shakespeare does not show us 
this scene, but tells us the story of it by a third person, 
chiefly, I suppose, because he would not diminish the effect 
of that last scene of all, which is the climax of the play. For 
Hermione is not really dead, you know. All this time she 
has been in retirement, in a removed house which twice or 
thrice a day Paulina hath visited. 

I believe it has been sometimes objected that this long 
seclusion of the Queen is unnatural or unkind to Leontes. 
But I cannot understand it thus. What else could she 
have done? For the difference between them was not a 
passing quarrel to be made up to-morrow, but a deep and 
abiding breach of trust. To a high-souled woman like 
Hermione, with a profound sense of the sacredness of her 
plighted love and truth, such a suspicion as that of Leontes 
was an immeasurable wrong. There was no sullen resent- 



THE WINTER'S TALE 113 

ment nourished In her heart during all those years; but that 
deep wound to her woman's honor could not be speedily 
healed by any easy words of penitence or of promise. She 
could bear it with queenly patience if she might be alone, — 
but that was all. After that dreadful experience she could 
not easily believe that her husband's trust in her would 
ever grow firm and sound again. Her love for him she 
kept true; she could have forgiven him in his penitence and 
grief; but she could not trust him again. To take her 
place by his side once more in the old scenes, with the old 
cruel memory that would not die, with the ever-present 
dread that the old baseless suspicion might still be rankling 
in her husband's heart, — that she could not do ! 

And she would never have done it had it not been for 
Perdita. The oracle had given a doubtful hope that the lost 
babe might sometime be found, and she had always cher- 
ished that shadowy hope as the one possibility of future 
happiness. And now that Perdita had been found and 
restored to her father, now that her husband and Polixenes 
had embraced again in forgiveness of the past, and were 
looking forward to the wedding of their children, Hermione 
could maintain her concealment no longer. She must see 
her child; and now, surely, over that daughter the father 
and mother can forget the painful past and knit up the old 
love in perfect truth. Perdita had separated them; she 
alone could unite them. 

And so the two Kings, with Perdita and Florizel, have 
accompanied Paulina to that removed house to see the 
famous statue of the Queen by Giulio Romano. This cen- 
tral device of the last scene is one of the most boldly simple 
that Shakespeare ever attempted, and only with such a calm, 
statuesque character as Hermione could it have been made 
possible. As it is, I do not know a more touching or a 
more noble scene. It is very impressive on the stage ; yet 
there is nothing forced or theatrical about it. The very 
surprise and wonder of it seem natural and fitting. You 
remember the group : Leontes full of bitter sweet memories 
and deep compunction of soul, as if he felt himself hardly 



114 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

worthy to see even the statue of her he had so wronged; 
the sympathizing Polixenes; fair Perdita herself almost 
as pale as marble, speechless in wonder and veneration 
before the form of the mother she has never known. Words 
would mar the perfect joy of that reunion; and Hermione 
speaks not one. Only when Paulina leads Perdita to kneel 
with trembling joy at her mother's feet, then the tears of 
Hermione gush forth and she breaks her long silence : 

You gods, look down 
And from your sacred vials pour your graces 
Upon my daughter's head ! Tell me, mine own, 
Where hast thou been preserv'd? where liv'd? 

What scene could we better choose to keep in our recol- 
lection as we take leave of Shakespeare than this one, very 
likely the last he ever wrote. Surely it is not idle to think 
that such passages as these may show us in what atmosphere 
of quiet domestic love and content Shakespeare passed his 
latest days. When he drew the noble, the injured, the for- 
giving Hermione, surely he could have had no one else in 
his thought than his own Anne Hathaway. It would take 
very much more than any paltry story of the bequest of a 
second-best bed to make me believe that the afternoon of 
this man's life was not passed in the sunshine of that same 
affection which had burst upon his young manhood in the 
days of the Midsummer Night's Dream more than a score 
of years before; which had, though perhaps sorely tried, 
followed him with benediction in all his darkest days, and 
embosomed him to the last. 

This man's knowledge of human life was such as no 
other poet could ever boast; the range of character his 
creative imagination has made to live before us is marvel- 
ously wide ; but I like to think that this our greatest poet, 
nay I make bold to say the world's greatest poet, however 
wide the circuit of his work, closed it at last with loving 
pictures of those pure domestic affections that consecrate 
the names of wife and mother and bloom fair in the garden 
of home. 



SHAKESPEARE THE MAN 

I HAVE heard somewhere of an Irish Member on the 
floor of the House of Commons, who, after wrestling 
some time rather ineffectually with the difficulties of his 
subject, at last gave it up in despair, exclaiming as he sat 
down, "Mr. Speaker, I am bothered entirely for the lack of 
preliminary information." Any one who ventures to speak 
upon the man Shakespeare, will of course experience some- 
thing of the same difficulty. We have no biography of 
the man. We never can have. All the certain facts of his 
career can be stated in two or three sentences. Nor is. it 
easy, we are told, to discover in the great array of char- 
acters he has drawn, any clear outline of his own person- 
ality; we are thwarted by the intensely dramatic char- 
acter of his genius. Hamlet and Brutus and Antony; Cor- 
delia and Rosalind and Imogen and all the rest of the 
wonderful company, — these we know; but Shakespeare we 
have never heard speak. 

So true is this that some very competent students and 
lovers of Shakespeare have pronounced the effort to form 
any clear picture of his personality hopeless and futile. 
"Shakespeare," says Browning, "never so little left his 
bosom's gate ajar." Says Matthew Arnold: 

Others abide our question. Thou art free. 
We ask and ask — Thou smilest and art still. 

Sir Sidney Lee, in the latest edition of his Life of Shake- 
speare, avers that "no critical test has yet been found 
whereby to disentangle Shakespeare's personal feelings or 
opinions from those which he imputes to the creatures of 
his dramatic world." 

Yet I must think such statements are exaggerated. The 

115 



ii6 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

facts we know of Shakespeare's life are certainly meager; 
but they are in several respects very significant. And are 
his plays so dramatic as to conceal their author entirely? 
Can anybody conceive it possible that a man should write 
over thirty great plays and never disclose anything of his 
own moral and emotional nature, his cast of mind and 
habits of observation? Of course no one thinks that we 
can read in any of Shakespeare's plays an exact transcript 
of his experience or of any phase of that experience. Every- 
thing is modified, transformed by his Imagination, It may 
be dlflicult to find in his dramas his particular likes and 
dislikes; the more important question is, what sort of man 
must he have been who could make us acquainted with all 
this world of men and women? How did he himself 
come to know so many? Doubtless the picture we can form 
of Shakespeare's personality may be somewhat lacking in 
sharp, well-defined features; so is the picture you form of 
half of the men you know on the street. And as a rule, 
the more full and well-rounded a nature, the more diffi- 
cult is it to analyze and depict. We Incline to measure men 
by their limitations and their peculiarities. Eccentricities 
and prejudices are handy pegs on which to hang our labels, 
and a crank is much more easily Imagined than a sage. But 
no man can read through Shakespeare's plays without 
forming at least some conception of Shakespeare's char- 
acter. He knows for example, as Professor Bradley has 
said, that these plays could not have been written by such 
a man as Milton or Shelley or Wordsworth, and I am ready 
to add, by such a man as Bacon, 

I wish then to state some few traits of the man William 
Shakespeare which I think we may all see In his life or 
infer from his work. First, consider for a moment the 
unquestioned facts of his life. They are only these. He 
was born probably on April 23, 1564. He married, after 
only once calling of the banns, at the age of eighteen, a 
woman eight years his senior; after his marriage he went 
up to London. How long after, we do not know. One 
of the best students of his life thinks it must have been 



SHAKESPEARE THE MAN 117 

as early as 1582. Another thinks that It could not have 
been earlier than 1586. What he went to London for we 
do not know, or what he did when he got there; only in 
1592, when he had been in London six to ten years, do we 
find the first mention of him as a playwright whose success 
was provoking the jealousy of his rivals. From that time 
for some fifteen years his plays were appearing in rapid 
succession; a casual mention by a minor writer shows that 
by 1598 he had written as many as twelve. Of his life 
during those London years we know only one thing, — we 
know that he was not only making plays, but making money 
and investing it carefully and wisely. By 1605 he had 
purchased real estate in and near his native town of Strat- 
ford-on-Avon to the value of 920 pounds, which we may 
estimate as equivalent to about $60,000 nowadays, and he 
certainly had other property in London also. Finally, 
somewhere between 1608 to 161 1, he retired from Lon- 
don and came home to Stratford to spend the remainder of 
his days in the goodly house which he had purchased as 
early as 1597, and in which he died in 1616. These are 
all the facts we know beyond question; you can put them 
all into a sentence. He married at eighteen a wife who 
was twenty-five or twenty-six; at about twenty-one went up 
to London; in the course of the next twenty years achieved 
immortality and a rent-roll; at thirty-four bought a house 
and corner lot in his native village; at about forty-five 
settled down there to reside; at fifty-two died. That is tlie 
whole story. 

Of course a great body of tradition has collected around 
these facts, — that the young Shakespeare was a school- 
master, a butcher, that he went up to London because of 
a difficulty over a deer-stealing adventure in Sir Thomas 
Lucy's park, that he held horses at the theater door, that 
he played the part of the ghost in Hamlet and did not 
play it well, that he was lame, that the Earl of Southampton 
gave him a thousand pounds for no clearly assigned rea- 
son, that he died of a fever brought on by drinking too 
late at Stratford one night with his old friend Ben Jonson, 



ii8 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

that he himself composed the doggerel verses on his tomb- 
stone, — of such traditions there is legion, some of which 
may be true, more are probably false, and none can be 
certain. Then the undoubted facts of his life have given 
rise to numerous conjectures equally uncertain. Because 
he married, apparently with some haste, a woman eight 
years older than himself, it has been conjectured that the 
marriage proved an unhappy one, though there is not a 
particle of evidence that it did. Then Shakespeare wrote 
a most interesting series of sonnets that seem to be auto- 
biographical; many of us think they are autobiographical, 
and would throw a great deal of light on Shakespeare's 
London life if we could only agree upon any interpretation 
of them. And then comes Sir Sidney Lee and avers that 
nothing whatever can be inferred from the order of the 
sonnets, and that most of them have very slight autobio- 
graphical value, if any at all. 

But throwing aside all tradition and doubtful con- 
jecture, what can we read in the plain, unquestioned facts 
of this life? Can we form no conception of the eager youth 
who, refusing to measure his love by his fortune, makes a 
perhaps rash, certainly not a careful and prudent, marriage; 
then, when the children come, goes up to London, carry- 
ing nothing of experience save what he has gained in the 
little provincial town and nothing of learning save the 
small Latin and less Greek that he has learned in the 
grammar school of that town; toils at the work he has 
chosen from four to seven years before he can see any 
one of his plays acted upon the stage and his great career 
really beginning? For you know there was nothing really 
precocious about the genius of Shakespeare. Venus and 
Adonis, which he says was the "first heir of the invention," 
was not published until 1593, when he was twenty-nine years 
old, though possibly written a little earlier. Love's Labour's 
Lost, probably the first play written entirely by him, may 
be dated possibly as early as 1591. What of those years 
of apprenticeship in London? How comes it that the 
youngster who at twenty or twenty-one is holding horses 



SHAKESPEARE THE MAN 119 

at the theater door or playing minor parts on the stage, 
at twenty-eight or twenty-nine is writing a poem that he 
ventures to dedicate to the Earl of Southampton and is a 
dangerous rival to the foremost playwrights of the day? 
Grant his genius, admit that he must have had by nature 
marvelous gifts of expression; yet such a record proves 
a great intensity of nature and an impassioned interest in 
human life. 

But his London life surely proves also that, however 
intense and impassioned his temperament, he must have 
had it under control. The Shakespeare of the London years 
was no mere Bohemian, still less was he, like Marlowe and 
Greene and almost all his fellow playwrights, a reckless 
and dissolute man. Nobody claims that his life in those 
years can be proved altogether exemplary. If, as seems 
to me probable, the sonnets are mostly autobiographical, 
there is indication in some of them of an episode of darker 
passion which for a time overcame his conscience and his 
reason. It is just possible that some of the stories of ir- 
regularities in those years have some foundation, though 
nothing of the kind rests on any good evidence. On the 
contrary, the only bit of documentary evidence as to Shake- 
speare's private life in London, recently discovered by 
our American scholar. Professor Wallace, proves that, for 
some years before and after 1604, he was living in the house 
of one Mountjoy, a Huguenot refugee, maker of ladies' 
head-dresses, and that he took a practical and kindly in- 
terest in the domestic affairs of that family. And we cer- 
tainly need no evidence that a man of reckless and dis- 
solute life could not have written two or three plays a 
year for twelve or fourteen years, plays steadily growing 
in intellectual power and moral soundness with every year. 
And if you say this is accounted for by his wonderful genius, 
then remember the bare fact I have mentioned, that all 
through those years he was making money, — not spending 
it, but saving it, investing it shrewdly and collecting his 
rents and income vp'-y rigorously. This is the one thing 
in his career about which there can be no doubt. There 



I20 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

are, I know, people who find It difficult to associate such 
thrift with the highest poetical genius, and get a kind of 
shock at knowing that Shakespeare prosecuted a townsman 
for a debt of one pound ten shillings' worth of malt while 
he was writing Macbeth. But nothing can be more certain, 
I think, than that the genius of the man William Shake- 
speare had a foundation of solid common sense and business 
sagacity. 

One other thing notice. However long his stay In 
London, however many the attractions and distractions of 
life there, he always considered Stratford-on-Avon his home 
and always intended to return there. The earliest plays, like 
Love's Labour's Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and 
A Midsummer Night's Dream, are full of reminiscences of 
Stratford. In the Midsummer Night, indeed, you may say 
there Is nothing else; and the latest plays, especially The 
Winter's Tale, If I read it aright, are full of the deep and 
quiet satisfaction of return to early life and early love. 
There is no evidence, then, that Shakespeare had forsaken 
or forgotten his wife and children at home. With what 
was probably the first considerable sum of money he could 
save he bought for them In 1597 a goodly house In Strat- 
ford, and the following years proceeded to put it in repair 
and plant an orchard about It. For the next twelve years 
he would seem to have spent annually In New Place and 
in the purchase or lease of real estate In the vicinity, sums 
equivalent to nearly four thousand dollars a year. He 
was not Indifferent to outward tokens of rank, and as 
early as 1599 succeeded in obtaining the grant to bear a 
coat of arms, for which his father had applied unsuccess- 
fully. When he came back to Stratford about 16 10, he was 
probably In wealth and social consideration the most Im- 
portant person in his native village. 

Now I wish to put beside these facts, which may seem 
to Indicate a nature unattractively mundane and practical, 
the only two recorded comments made upon Shakespeare's 
nature by eye-witnesses during those London years. A 
publisher named Chettle says he Is sorry for having printed 



SHAKESPEARE THE MAN 121 

some months before depreciatory remarks with reference 
to Shakespeare's works, because he has himself since come 
to know him personally and seen his demeanor, "no less 
civil than he Is excellent in the quality he professes." Be- 
sides, he adds, other people have reported "his uprightness 
of dealing which argues his honesty." Honesty, you 
know, meant more then than at present. It meant honor, 
courtesy. And Ben Jonson, who knew him well, declared, 
"I loved the man and do honor his memory on this side 
idolatry as much as any. He was indeed honest, and of an 
open and free nature." And in Jonson's lines on the folio 
portrait he says, you remember, 

This figure that thou here seest put, 
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut. 

That epithet "gentle" seems to have been often applied to 
Shakespeare in later years. Doubtless it has a wide and 
vague meaning, but it always implies at least something 
of courtesy and affability. Men never spoke of gentle 
Marlowe, or even, I should say, of gentle John Milton. 
Such testimonies, meager as they are, certainly give us 
some hints of the temperament which one thinks made 
friends for Shakespeare in those London years among all 
sorts of people, from the brilliant young Earl of Southamp- 
ton to the plain Huguenot "tire-maker," Mountjoy, in 
whose house he lived. 

And now this picture of the man Shakespeare that we 
form from the meager facts of his life is confirmed, I 
believe, by the inferences we draw from the dramas. In 
the first place the range and variety of the persons in those 
dramas is proof of the openness and geniality of Shake- 
speare's temper as a man. How did he come to create 
so many different men and women, — some seven hundred of 
them? I say create; but strictly speaking the imagination 
never does create. It only expands, transforms, and com- 
bines the elements of experience into new wholes, Shake- 
speare in some sense must have known something of all 
those people, and he could not have known them if he had 



122 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

not been a companionable man who liked people and was 
liked by them. Your great dramatist can never be a lofty, 
isolated man like Milton, or a visionary idealist like 
Shelley, or a misanthrope like S^^ift, or a philosopher like 
Coleridge, or a retired and solitary thinker like Words- 
worth. These men may know something of what they call 
human nature, as they learn it by introspection and re- 
flection, but they do not know men and women, they do not 
know life. They have each only a narrow circle of friends. 
But for Shakespeare the world was full of interesting folk. 
Of narrative invention he had comparatively little; the 
plots of his plays, as everybody knows, are all borrowed, 
and sometimes not very well borrowed, put together in 
hasty, impossible fashion. But the characters are always 
vital — real men and women. You feel sure that Shake- 
speare has known them. He was not, I suppose, a reader 
of many books; Holinshed's Chronicles for English history, 
and Plutarch's Lives for the classical world seem to have 
sufficed him. But the characters whom he found in books 
lived in his imagination as really as those that had entered 
there through his marvelous observation. 

Indeed, observation is hardly the word to describe the 
method of Shakespeare's acquaintance with men and things. 
It implies too passive a relation. His observation proper 
was indeed marvelously exact, his eye marvelously acute. 
He saw common things, for example, as you and I do not. 
Do you know what is the most characteristic thing about 
a violet? That it is modest or humble? Anybody knows 
that. That it is blue? Thousands of flowers are blue, — 
though, if Shakespeare wished to mention its color he 
would be likely to specify in some poetic way the shade of 
blue, as of the pale wood violet, of which he says it is 
sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes. But Shakespeare 
noticed that the most characteristic thing about a violet is 
that it has a habit of gently nodding on its stem, 

Where oxslips and the nodding violet grows. 
Or, again, ,*?,.i''i 



SHAKESPEARE THE MAN 123 

As gentle 
As zephyrs blowing below the violet, 
Not wagging his sweet head. 

Did you ever notice that? Do you know just how many 
s»pots there are in the bottom of a cowslip? Shakespeare 
did: 

On her left breast 
A mole cinque-spotted like the crimson drops 
r the bottom of a cowslip. 

Scores of examples of this nicety of vision might be cited 
if I were talking of Shakespeare's poetry, but what I am 
now insisting is that his larger observation of men and 
things was always active. It not only sees, it interprets 
what he sees. Shakespeare's temperament, we feel sure, 
was always alert and eager. He lived with men, he knew 
men, was spontaneously interested In and sympathized with 
them. 

Consider his humor, for a man's humor is generally a 
pretty good test of his attitude towards his fellow men 
and his enjoyment of life. What a genial and kindly humor 
it is. He does not care much for loud and empty mirth; 
there is not in his plays much of that laughter that is like 
the crackling of thorns under a pot. His best comedies, 
like As You Like It, seem an expression of the full, healthy 
joyousness of living. But while his humor of course usually 
plays about some of the manifold contrasts and inconsist- 
encies of this varied life of ours, his humorous people 
are never mere eccentrics or freaks; they all belong to our 
family. We must own them as men and brothers. There 
are in the company, for example, a good many of those 
people whom we, when we see them in real life, are apt to 
classify complacently as stupid people, — Mrs. Quickly, Dog- 
berry, Verges, Bardolph, Shallow, Slender, and all the rest. 
Yet Shakespeare never assumes any air of superiority to 
them. He vastly enjoys their company, and, what is more 
to the point, you are sure they enjoyed his. Often his 
humor is so touched with kindly human sympathy that it 



124 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

seems to shade Imperceptibly into pathos. You remember 
old Justice Shallow's reminiscences with Cousin Silence, 
"Jesu, Jesu, the mad days that I have spent ! And to see 
how many of my old acquaintances are dead!" "We shall 
all follow," says Silence. "Certain, 'tis certain; very sure, 
very sure. Death, as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all; 
all shall die. How a good yoke of bullocks at Stam- 
ford fair?" And everybody remembers Mrs. Quickly's 
account of the last moments of Jack Falstaff. "After I saw 
him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers, and smile 
upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was but one way; 
for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a' babbled of green 
fields." 

Not that Shakespeare's humor never has a satiric qual- 
ity, but he generally reserves his satire for those people 
who are somehow hollow, who assume an inflated dignity 
or bigness, — Bottom, old Polonius, Malvolio, ancient Pis- 
tol, and their like. These people he laughs at, rather than 
laughs with. What Carlyle somewhere calls "pretentious 
ineptitude," was evidently very amusing to Shakespeare, 
but also somewhat annoying. Yet even here his humor is 
not bitter or cynical. The generally cynical temper seemed 
a tragic thing to Shakespeare, — as you can see in his 
Timon, — a thing to be pitied or feared. 

Are there then no types of character that this man 
really hated? Well, not many; the man who really knows 
men and women as Shakespeare did, will find something 
to touch his sympathy in almost every life. "Hate that 
man," said Charles Lamb once, "how could I hate him? 
Don't I know him?" Yet there were men whom Shake- 
speare I think regarded with unmixed aversion, almost 
hatred. Who is the worst man in Shakespeare's world? 
Everybody will say without much hesitation, lago. Why? 
Because lago is the embodiment of absolute selfishness. 
Envy and the love of personal power make him blind to 
innocence and contemptuous of virtue. A hard, deceitful, 
scheming, merciless man. Goneril and Regan, in Lear, 
belong to the same class. Now a nature like Shakespeare's, 



SHAKESPEARE THE MAN 125 

open and free, as Ben Jonson called it, finds such characters 
as these intolerable. 

Do we find any confirmation in the dramas for that 
practical wisdom, that power of self-control which seems 
so certain in the meager records of Shakespeare's London 
life? I think we can. I find that in Shakespeare's world 
it is just this practical wisdom, this poise and self-control 
that insures success and consideration. Says Hamlet to 
Horatio, — 

Blest are those 
Whose blood and judgement are so well commingled 
That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger 
To sound what stop she please. Give me that man 
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him 
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart, 
As I do thee. 

Now this type of man, strong but well-balanced, self- 
controlled, cannot be the hero of tragedy and not often of 
comedy, and so we shall not expect to find many examples 
of the type in Shakespeare's plays. Yet there are such 
men, and they always in some way seem to have Shake- 
speare's approval and admiration. Horatio himself is an 
example, and Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream, 
and the banished Duke in As You Like It, and best of all, 
Henry the Fifth. It has been often said that Henry 
the Fifth was Shakespeare's favorite hero; and there is 
some reason to think so. He has drawn out his story 
as Prince and King through three plays, and in the choruses 
of Henry V , speaking for once as if in his own person, has 
given him such enthusiastic praise that it seems probable 
we have in Henry a type of character Shakespeare himself 
admired. Now Henry, while he is Prince Hal, cares little 
for decorum and throws himself heartily enough into the 
humors of Falstaff and of the Boar's Head. Yet in his 
wildest days he never quite forgets his duty; and when the 
call for manly action comes, he is ready, throws off — 
perhaps rather too cruelly — Falstaff and his roistering com- 
panions and takes up the duties of kingship. Yet he keeps 



126 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

always a certain boyish exuberance of spirits, he likes all 
sorts of people and, though king, is still a good fellow. 
But he never loses mastery of himself, he never makes mis- 
takes, he is never impatient, he never gets angry. I think 
there is a great deal of William Shakespeare in this King 
Harry the Fifth. 

And if this poise and self-control is a condition of suc- 
cess, the lack of it means failure — often tragic failure. In 
the great tragedies of Shakespeare you will find that the 
catastrophe comes either from a lack of passion as motive 
power or from a failure to direct and control such pas- 
sion. Characters as unlike as Hamlet and Mark Antony 
both go down because their blood and judgment are not 
well commingled. 

But you will ask, is this all we know of the man Shake- 
speare, this energetic, facile, kindly, marvelously observant, 
but rather mundane man that we see in the meager records 
of his life? Hardly. The deepest things in any man's 
thinking and feeling, certainly in any poet's thought and 
feeling, are not seen in the story of his outward business and 
affairs. Yet up to about 1600, when Shakespeare was, you 
remember, thirty-six years of age, this is the type of man 
seen in his work. For, with the exception of the young 
man's romantic tragedy of love and death, Romeo and 
Juliet, the work is all comedy, dealing mostly with the 
lighter and more joyous sides of life, or history, in which 
the fate of the individual is involved in the great sweep of 
national affairs. Shakespeare, one thinks, as yet has not 
much considered the deeper and darker problems of life. 
But then suddenly his work changes. The comedy darkens 
in Measure for Measure and All's Well, and then for some 
five or six years he writes tragedy and nothing but tragedy. 
Why this change in the temper of his work we do not know, 
but of one thing we may be quite sure ; it was no good easy 
man, altogether unstirred by stronger passions and un- 
vexed by obstinate questions, that wrote that great series 
of tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Antony, 
Timon. There are some indications, especially in the son- 



SHAKESPEARE THE MAN 127 

nets, of some emotional agitation in Shakespeare's private 
life about that time. But setting aside all mere conjecture, 
it is certainly not improbable that something in the intimate 
personal experience of Shakespeare during those years may 
have forced his thought upon the great problems of sin and 
suffering. I have often thought it strange and perhaps 
significant that the line of tragedies begins with Hamlet, 
the only play in which the tragedy is not external but 
internal, the tragedy of doubt and skepticism that puzzles 
the will and benumbs all our active faculties. It is as if 
at the outset of this tragic period Shakespeare was dwelling 
in thought not so much upon the external pain and sorrow 
in this unintelligible world, as upon the meaning and mystery 
of it all. No other play is so full of spiritual doubt and 
wonder; no other play suggests so many of those problems 
for which every thoughtful man sometimes yearns to find 
solution; no other play is so enfolded in an atmosphere of 
the supernatural. And in all the later tragedies the interest 
is primarily ethical, not external; the catastrophe is never 
merely physical or melodramatic. These tragedies are 
so supremely great not because of any thrilling dramatic 
situation or harrowing exhibition of passion, but because 
of their absolute truth to the deepest and most solemn laws 
of our human nature. Nowhere has Shakespeare so clearly 
shown the sternness and sanity of his moral judgments. 
Sometimes, as in Macbeth or Antony and Cleopatra, he 
shows us the inevitable ruin that follows unbridled pas- 
sion, whether of ambition or of lust. These plays are not 
didactic in purpose. Shakespeare is no preacher. He is 
simply holding the mirror up to nature. And he has 
none of that cheap morality that is afraid to tell the 
truth. In the play of Antony and Cleopatra, for example, — 
one of the most powerful of his works, — he knows that 
Antony did not lose the world for nothing. He knows 
that the pleasures of sin, though they be but for a season, 
are very real pleasures while they last. And he makes us 
see it too. As we read, something of the magic of this 
great queen of the world falls over us. We understand 



128 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

the enchantment that Is upon Antony, and when we under- 
stand that we cannot stand aloof In cool Indifference and 
condemn him. Yet all this dazzle of the lust of the eyes and 
the pride of life does not for a moment blind us to the 
quality of Antony's action, and the inevitable doom which 
he Is every moment nearlng. Precisely there resides the 
tragedy. We see his manhood ebbing away, his Iron reso- 
lution growing soft and pliant, and "his captain's heart, 
which in the scuffles of great fights" had "burst the buckles 
on his breast," losing Its soldier's temper, and, warmed no 
longer by any chaste or temperate affection, bursting at 
last in shame and despair. There could be no higher proof 
of Shakespeare's moral steadiness of vision and self-com- 
mand than his power to depict with even-handed justice at 
once the charms and the results of sin. 

In the other type of tragedy, like Othello and Lear, 
we have that spectacle more awful because more unin- 
telligible, of the triumph of guilt and hatred over inno- 
cence and nobility. Such plays leave us dazed In wonder 
and pity; yet feeling through all confusion and agony 
of soul that purity and truth are supremely beautiful things, 
better than happiness, better than life. Who would not 
rather die as Desdemona than live as lago? In Lear It is 
the old, gray-haired King, the generous Kent, and the 
heavenly Cordelia that go down before the awful storm of 
wrong; but, as the dying King bends, blind and crazed, 
over the lifeless body of his daughter and moans, "Cordelia, 
Cordelia, stay a little," who does not feel that in all the 
defeats and contradictions of this unintelligible world the 
only thing of priceless value is a pure and heroic life? 

This great series of tragedies certainly proves that the 
deeper and darker phases of human life were passing 
through the study of Shakespeare's Imagination in the years 
from 1600 to 1606, but I do not see that they present any- 
thing really inconsistent with the conception of Shake- 
speare's character that we form from the record of those 
years or from a study of his earlier work. They enlarge and 
deepen that conception; they do not contradict It. Nay, In 



SHAKESPEARE THE MAN 129 

one respect they confirm it, for, if I mistake not, tiiere is 
indication even in these tragedies of that breadth of sym- 
pathy, that sense of fellowship with all men, which is one 
of the most obvious traits of the man. An unflinching recog- 
nition of the strictest moral laws is not inconsistent with 
a pity for the victims of their violation. Consider Shake- 
speare's bad men and women. For only two or three, 
as I have said, has he an unmixed hatred, but Macbeth 
and Lady Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, the King in 
Hamlet, Shylock, and all the rest, it is only with some touch 
of charity for them and pity for their sin and ruin that we 
leave them at the last. It was in this large, hopeful, and 
kindly temper, surely befitting the greatest of dramatists, 
that Shakespeare looked out upon this world. 

I think one is glad to know that this tragic mood was 
not dominant in the latest work or the latest years of 
Shakespeare's life. After about twenty years' connection 
with the stage in London, the purpose we think he had 
cherished during all those years was fulfilled and Shake- 
speare came home to Stratford-on-Avon. Sir Sidney Lee 
thinks it was in 1 6 1 1 . Some students think it may have been 
a year or two before that. In fact, his return was probably 
gradual, his visits to Stratford growing more frequent as 
he gradually gave up his connection with the theater in 
London; and by 161 1 we may believe he was settled for the 
rest of his life in New Place with his wife and daughters. 
Now it was pretty certainly in the year 1610-1 1 that Shake- 
speare wrote the three plays I think we love best of all, — 
Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. These 
plays are not tragedies, nor are they exactly comedies either. 
They are plays of rest after struggle, of reconciliation after 
suspicion, of home and finality. In two of them — Cym- 
beline and The Winter's Tale — the central character is a 
wife, cruelly suspected by her husband but winning back at 
last by unwavering fidelity the trust that has always been 
deserved. Imogen and Hermione are the crown of woman- 
hood in Shakespeare's world. Then these three plays pic- 
ture, as never before in Shakespeare's pages, the coy and 



130 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

gentle charm of girlhood, not now with the rapture of the 
lover, but with the wise and tender solicitude of a father; 
it is not Romeo and Juliet, but Prospero and Miranda, 
Leontes and Perdita. And, furthermore, these plays are 
redolent of the charm of country life, of green fields and 
gardens and flowers. We are in the country again, as in the 
days of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Perdita's gar- 
den is even lovelier than the bank whereon sometime Ti- 
tania slept. The plays are as wise as ever; and Shake- 
speare's grasp of character as firm, and his sense of beauty I 
think deeper than in the earlier plays; but the glow of pas- 
sion is cooled and all three plays, whatever the suspicion or 
harshness in the earlier Acts, all end as with a deep and 
long-drawn breath of quiet content. 

Now I am well aware of the folly of trying to find in 
Shakespeare's plays any close transcript of the events of his 
personal career; yet no one can convince me that the general 
tone of all these last plays is not that of Shakespeare's re- 
newed family life at Stratford-on-Avon. I find no sure evi- 
dence that there was ever any estrangemeqt or jealousy be- 
tween Shakespeare and his wife during his long years in 
London; but if there had been, I am sure it was over by 
1610. That such a play as The Winter's Tale could have 
been written in that society which the experience of Solomon 
pronounces worse than "a continual dropping in a very 
rainy day," — that would be stranger than any miracle. No, 
I feel sure that the record of those latest years, as inter- 
preted by these plays, may make us certain that Shakespeare, 
like Wordworth's Happy Warrior, was after all, certainly 
in these later years, 

a Soul whose master-bias leans 
To homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes, 

and that however wide the circuit of his work, he closes it 
at last with pictures of those affections that bloom fair in 
the garden of home. 

The image we can thus form of the man must at best be 
somewhat vague, lacking in those specific and picturesque 



SHAKESPEARE THE MAN 131 

features in which character is most easily read; but I think 
we can be sure of its main outlines, — a positive, well-bal- 
anced man, of strong passions under firm control, genial and 
interested in all sorts of people, with marvelous powers of 
observation and an imagination to interpret all he saw into 
lasting forms of life and beauty. And I think one's concep- 
tion of Shakespeare's character loses something of breadth 
and truth when we try to separate the man from the poet, 
as I have half unconsciously been doing. For we tend to 
forget that there were not two Shakespeares. The poet 
who ruled a vast demesne on the heights of Parnassus was 
the same man who owned a house and corner lot in Strat- 
ford-on-Avon. The dramatist whose speech delights us 
by an affluence of power and beauty such as none of his 
contemporaries could approach, is the same man who could 
lean over the gate of New Place of a morning to jest with 
Dogberry or chat with Goodman Verges. And in opposi- 
tion to all that has been said about the impossibility of 
knowing anything of William Shakespeare, I must say that 
I thiqk one rises from a study of his life and work with 
something like a sense of personal acquaintance with the 
man. One feels at least as old Ben Jonson said, that he 
was honest and of an open and free nature, a man to know. 
One other question there is, which on this day^ we cannot 
forbear to ask. Was Shakespeare a religious man? We get 
no answer from the recorded facts of his life. The tradition 
that he disliked the Puritans, based mostly on a misinter- 
pretation of some one or two pages in Twelfth Night and 
All's Well, and the tradition that he died a Roman Catholic, 
first heard of a hundred years after his death in the talk of 
a gossipy clergyman, are both valueless. I think the answer 
to the question must depend on the meaning we give to the 
question itself. If religion be only, as Matthew Arnold once 
defined it, morality touched with emotion, — then we may 
perhaps venture to call Shakespeare a religious man. He 
certainly recognized the nature and the imperative demands 

* This paper was first delivered as an address in celebration of the ter- 
centenary of Shakespeare's death. [L. B. G.] 



132 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

of morality; he saw that the highest values in life are always 
moral values. We may be sure also that he was a reverent 
man. We shall find in his plays no flippant or contemptuous 
references to religious belief or practice, save on the lips of 
men who were themselves shallow or base. More than this, 
there is evidence enough in such plays as Hamlet that 
Shakespeare had pondered the meanings and the mystery 
of life. He could have been no stranger to those thoughts 
that are beyond the reaches of our souls. What solutions he 
ever reached for those deepest problems that vex the think- 
ing soul, we do not know; it seems to me likely that he put 
them aside as insoluble, and in his later years sought quiet 
and content within the realm of positive knowledge. We 
may well be slow in pronouncing upon any man's religion; 
that is a matter between himself and his God. But we may 
not uncharitably say that in reading Shakespeare's pages we 
long for one thing, and for one thing only. With this all- 
embracing knowledge that seems to include almost the 
whole realm of human nature, could we but have a little 
faith. If the vision that saw so clearly and justly all the 
facts of human life could have had some faith in things un- 
seen. Surely of such faith the saintly Cordelia, the noble 
Hermione, the gentle Desdemona, the Hamlet of Luther's 
Wittenberg might have known something. But among the 
very latest words of the great magician who created them all 
are these, which sound with a solemn pathos down the cen- 
turies, — 

We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on, and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep. 

He was true to the facts of knowledge only. He showed the 
human soul as it is ; he carried it through all the tangled web 
of circumstance, the struggles of good and evil, the joys and 
pains that make up this life of ours here, quite down to the 
moment when the fevered play is quite played out; "the 
rest is silence." We need one other book beside our Shake- 
speare; we need our Bible. 



THE LITERATURE OF THE AGE OF 
QUEEN ANNE 

I 

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AGE 

THE group of men of letters whose life and work form 
for us the center of interest during the period from 
1700 to 1750 were all at work, and most of them 
were doing their best work, during the reign of Anne (1702- 
17 14) ; but all of them outlived her. Addison was first to 
go, in 1 7 19; after him, in the next twenty-five years. Prior, 
Steele, Defoe, Gay, Pope, the great Dean Swift in 1745, 
and, last of all, Bolingbroke, in 175 i. The lifetime of this 
generation of men really decides the limits of the period. 

It may be admitted, at the outset, that this age of Queen 
Anne is not one of the inspiring ages of history. It was not 
an age of faith, of heroism, or of imagination. Moralists, 
reformers, poets have little good to say of it. That "with- 
ered, unbelieving, second-hand eighteenth century," says 
Carlyle after his sweeping fashion. And it is true that 
this age, if looked at from the outside after the fashion of 
the picturesque historian, presents some unhandsome fea- 
tures. If it was not flagrantly immoral, irreligious, it was 
very worldly and without lofty ideals. The Elizabethan 
enthusiasm, the Puritan zeal had passed; the new philan- 
thropic and reforming zeal had not yet come. Our ancestors 
of the Queen Anne time, in fact, were suspicious of anything 
that looked like enthusiasm, as disturbing the balance of 
sense and reason, but their society and morals suffered sadly 
for lack of it. The rich were getting richer and the poor 
were getting poorer. The young lord in the country hunted 
and drank and bullied and swore, and voted for the Tories 
and shouted for Church and State, — you can see him in 
Fielding; the young lord in town diced and drank at White's, 

133 



134 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

and lounged in the coffee-houses, showed his person and his 
toilet at the play, fought a duel now and then in Leicester 
Fields, and voted for the Whigs and shouted for Marlbor- 
ough and the Protestant Succession, — you may see him in 
the Taller and Spectator, a good many of him. 

Gaming was high. My Lady Cowper says, in 17 15, that 
no one thinks of setting down less than £200 at White's. 
The stage, though a little better than in the days of Charles 
II, was yet bad enough. I think a modern audience would 
hardly sit out one of Mr. Congreve's rattling comedies. Old 
Parson Adams in the novel wasn't far wrong when he 
averred that the only play of his day fit for a Christian to 
see was Mr. Steele's Conscious Lovers, though that, to be 
sure, was as good as a sermon. 

Englishmen were getting to drink deep, too. What an 
enormous amount there is swallowed in one of Fielding's 
novels, for instance. Temperance didn't always accompany 
the other virtues. Our friend Dick Steele was too often in 
his cups, and grave Mr. Addison has been known to keep 
him company. My Lord Oxford vexed Queen Anne by com- 
ing into her presence tipsy rather too often, and you might 
have seen Mr. Secretary St. John of a morning with a 
wet handkerchief around his head trying to cool his brain 
from last night's drinking before he began the day's 
correspondence. The lower classes, especially, with the in- 
crease of poverty in town were becoming more and more ad- 
dicted to this degrading vice. Early in the century the bale- 
ful habit of gin-drinking, unknown in England before, 
spread like a blight over London. "Retailers," says 
Lecky, "hung out painted boards announcing that their cus- 
tomers could be made drunk for a penny, dead drunk for 
two-pence, and should have straw for nothing." And after 
all it is perhaps the prevailing low tone of moral feeling, 
the absence of any quick sensibility in moral matters, that 
depresses you most as you look at the surface of this society. 
Fielding is not immoral at heart. But look, for instance, 
into some of those books that seriously profess to be writ- 
ten in the interest of morality, — say Richardson's novels, 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 135 

which one admiring prelate pronounced better than any- 
other book in the world except the Bible. It is not so much 
that they are bad, as that they do not know what goodness 
is; they have no high ideals. Richardson's famous novel is 
entitled Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded; what, pray, is the re- 
ward of virtue? Why simply that the abominable rake of a 
young squireen who has been pursuing Pamela through three 
volumes at last turns about and offers to marry her; she 
falls into his arms at once, and at this edifying conclusion 
we are expected to be melted into sympathy and admiration 
for the triumph of goodness. Even that most charming 
parson in a tie-wig, Mr. Addison, seems to me to preach 
sometimes a rather low and prudential kind of virtue. I 
am sure it is not the stuff out of which greatness is made. 

As for religion at this time, everybody knows that it 
seemed to be pretty much worn out of men; its vigor, its 
hold upon conscience almost entirely gone. It had been 
made a matter of politics; party feehng gathered about it; 
its solemn observances had been made the formal tests of 
qualification for civil office. My Lord Bolingbroke went 
from White's gaming table, or some worse place in Drury 
Lane, to St. Paul's in order to take the sacrament, and came 
home to write an essay against revealed religion. The 
Deists who attacked Christianity and the Churchmen who de- 
fended it had both been so anxious to prove it rational that 
they hadn't left much of anything supernatural in it; and 
plain men were coming to think it not worth while to trouble 
themselves much about it. The lifelong endeavors of such 
men as good Bishop Butler and good Bishop Berkeley and 
the despairing cynicism of such men as the great Dean Swift 
alike indicate that there was little religion left in England. 
"It is come," says Butler, "I know not how, to be taken 
for granted by many persons that Christianity is not so 
much as a subject for inquiry, but that it is now at length 
discovered to be fictitious." "I suppose it will be granted," 
says Swift, "that hardly one in a hundred among our people 
of quality or gentry appears to act by any principle of 
religion, while great numbers of them entirely discard it." 



136 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

The influence of the clergy upon character would seem 
to have been very small. In the country many of the better 
class were like Sir Roger de Coverley's chaplain, who read 
one of South's or Barrow's sermons for the good knight of 
a Sunday, and served as a kind of confidential valet for the 
rest of the week; while the other, and worse kind of a chap- 
lain, whom one sees rather too frequently in the literature of 
the time, played cards with my lady of an evening when she 
had no other company, rode at the tail of a hunt sometimes, 
married my lady's maid, — if he didn't do worse, — sat at 
the second table, and helped my lord to bed at night when 
he was unable to get there alone. 

Doubtless it would be possible, in this way, to sketch in 
a picture of the age that would be dark enough, and to cite 
only facts for our somber coloring. Yet I do not think that 
in the deepest sense such a picture would be true. The great 
mass of English people are, and always have been, thought- 
ful, serious, resolutely, yes, obstinately, bent on right things. 
So they were in the age of Queen Anne. And such a picture, 
whether true or false, would, for the most part, be beside 
our purpose as students of the literature of the age. Not 
that, as students of literature we are indifferent to the con- 
dition of society, manners, morals, religion; for literature is 
the expression of the life of an age, and the student of liter- 
ature is interested in all that makes up that life. It becomes 
us, however, to ask not what are the striking, external as- 
pects of the life of an age, but rather what were the ruling 
characteristics and tendencies of its thought, what was its 
intellectual and spiritual temper, that decided the general 
direction of all its activities, and got permanently embodied 
in letters. 

Now broad generalizations about the temper of an age 
are not always very safe ; but here surely one risks nothing in 
saying that even a slight examination of the Queen Anne 
time, shows what a fuller examination will confirm, that in 
all matters where the intellect was at all concerned, the 
ruling characteristic of the age was a critical and reasoning 
temper. There was a universal tendency to exalt the logical 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 137 

faculties at the expense of the imagination and the emotions. 
There was a universal distrust of any action that couldn't 
justify itself before the cool judgment, a universal passion 
for clearness and plausibility, for coolness and sanity of tem- 
per. The very word "enthusiasm," you know, was never 
used except in a bad sense. The age prided itself not on its 
great achievements, on its heroic efforts, its high imagina- 
tion, but on its good sense and good breeding. Wit and 
sense are its cardinal virtues ; you remember how the changes 
are rung on them in Pope's verse. "I have a great respect 
for Paul," said Anthony Collins, "he was a man of sense and 
a gentleman." With an amusing self-complacency the men 
of that day looked back upon the great age of Elizabeth as a 
stormy, half-barbaric time of fanatic religion and shocking 
manners which they had fortunately outgrown. Very odd it 
sounds now to hear the youthful Addison say of Edmund 
Spenser : 

Old Spenser, next, warm'd with poetic rage, 
In ancient tales amus'd a barbarous age; 
An age that yet uncultivate and rude, 
Where'er the poet's fancy led, pursu'd 

But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore. 
Can charm an understanding age no more; 
The long-spun allegories fulsome grow, 
While the dull moral lies too plain below. 

This temper was, in part, I suppose, a natural reaction 
from that of the preceding century and the last part of the 
sixteenth century. It seems sometimes to be almost a law 
of human progress that the advance of thought shall not be 
constant but intermittent. So an age of enthusiasm, of 
faith, of adventurous temper is very likely to succeed a 
longer period during which mental activity is chiefly directed 
to the criticism of accepted opinions. The national temper 
cools down; the acquisitions of the one period are subjected 
to the sifting scrutiny of the next. So it was here. In the 
twenty-five years that preceded the reign of Anne the whole 
temper of the people was largely changed. They were sick 



138 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

of controversy over theoretic matters. They were tired of 
the enthusiasms that produced such controversy. A rea- 
soned moderation in all things seemed to them the one thing 
desirable. We hear a great deal about the reaction in morals 
that followed the restoration of Charles II in 1660. But I 
think that reaction is exaggerated. The morality of the 
court was bad enough, doubtless; as to Charles himself and 
the little group of profligate courtiers who had brought back 
to England the vices and not the graces of France, the less 
that one says about their morals, the better, as any one who 
has turned over the pages of Pepys' Diary knows. But the 
contamination didn't extend far beyond the limits of the 
court. The great mass of the English people were untouched 
by it; the heart of the nation, Puritan and Cavalier alike, 
was sound, and the domestic virtues yet bloomed fair. But 
while there wasn't any general reaction against Puritan mo- 
rality, there was a general reaction against anything like en- 
thusiasm, irregularity, anything that seemed to savor of 
fanaticism. Men were tired of it. They were not disposed to |j 
lofty emotions or to lofty doctrines. Such emotions and such 
doctrines only seemed to set men at loggerheads. Let us 
have no more of them, they said. We have had enough of 
New Lights and New Models; now let us follow our reason 
like men of sense. Let us give our attention to practical mat- 
ters and leave to one side vagaries of imagination or con- 
jecture. 

Not that the age was indisposed to inquiry and dis- 
cussion. Quite the contrary; there was a universal itch for 
discussion. Politics, philosophy, religion descended into the 
street. Every question that was thought of interest at all 
was debated at the club, in the coffee-house, in the drawing- 
room. There was, of course, often a certain thinness in 
much of this thinking, and the line of argument and tone of 
discussion were usually such as befitted those places, — clear, 
plausible, and desultory, rather than profound, serious, or 
systematic. In Bishop Berkeley's charming Alciphron Ly- 
sicles, the young free thinker, is made to say, "I will under- 
take a lad of fourteen, bred in the modern way, shall make 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 139 

a better figure and be more considered in any drawing-room 
or any assembly of polite people, than one at four-and- 
twenty who hath lain by a long time at school or college. He 
shall say better things in a better manner, and be more liked 
by good judges. Where doth he pick up this improvement? 
Where our grave ancestors would never have looked for it 
— in a drawing-room, a coffee-house, a chocolate-house, at 
the tavern, or groom-porter's. In these and the like fash- 
ionable places of resort, it is the custom for polite people to 
speak freely on all subjects, religious, moral, or political. 
So that the young gentleman who frequents them is in the 
way of hearing many instructive lectures, seasoned with wit 
and raillery, and uttered with spirit." It is odd to read in 
the Memoirs of the Countess of Huntington that "My Lord 
Bolingbroke was seldom in her ladyship's company without 
discussing some topic beneficial to his eternal interest." 

Now this distrust of enthusiasm or emotion, this demand 
for clearness and sense, this easy, almost jaunty confidence 
in the cool logical faculty, — you may see them all at their 
height, I should say, during the Queen Anne period. And 
you may see them in all forms of thought. In politics, for 
example. The old high traditional notions of government 
had been pretty much overturned by the Revolution of the 
previous century. Men in one of the parties kept on talking 
about the divine right of kings; but nobody believed in it; 
they didn't believe it themselves. Said Swift, — and that, 
too, after he had turned Tory, — 

I confess it is hard to conceive how any law which the supreme 
power makes may not by the same supreme power be repealed; so 
that I shall not determine whether the Queen's right be indefeasible 
or not. 

It was plain enough in spite of all sophisms, that the 
monarch who had preceded Anne had been King of England 
by Act of Parliament, — nothing more or less; if there were 
any such thing as a divine, indefeasible right of hereditary 
succession to the throne of England, why then the crown 
belonged not on the head of Anne, but on the handsome 



140 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

curls of the Chevalier George, who was fighting Marlbor- 
ough over the water. But this didn't diminish the loyalty of 
Englishmen to Anne. The truth is, the divinity that doth 
hedge a king was unknown in England after 1688. The 
whole question of the nature of the monarchy and the re- 
lation of the different parts of the government to each other 
had been brought into popular, argumentative discussion. 
Englishmen wanted a wise and reasonable rule; for the ab- 
stract principle underlying it, they didn't care. 

In theology and philosophy it would be easy to show 
similar tendencies. The whole effort of the deistic move- 
ment was to divest religion of all that was mysterious in 
doctrine or extravagant in profession, and bring it down to 
the easy apprehension of the coffee-house and the drawing- 
room. Before all things it must be made to seem reasonable 
and prudent. Here as in government, the test is a wise ex- 
pediency. Pope says, you remember, not only 

For forms of government let fools contest; 
Whate'er is best administered is best, 

but also 

For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight ; 
His can't be wrong, whose life is in the right. 

All parties were content to assume the supremacy and 
sufficiency of the logical reason. It's best to believe in a 
God, said the Deists, because really it is difficult to talk on 
many matters reasonably or elegantly without assuming one 
as a first premise; it's safer to believe in a God, argued the 
timid orthodoxy of the day, because at all events there may 
be one, and he will damn you, if you don't. 

In practical religious life, likewise, it is curious to notice 
the same ambition for a reasoned moderation, for philo- 
sophical regulation of life, for conduct that couldn't be 
charged with folly. It is said by Mr. Hunt in his History of 
Religious Thought to be an actual fact that the two texts on 
which most sermons were preached in England during the 
first half of the eighteenth century were, "Let your modera- 
tion be known unto all men," and "Be not righteous over- 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 141 

much." But these were not exactly the texts on which Wes- 
ley and Whitefield began to preach, a little later. 

Now when you turn to the arts you see still more clearly 
the operation of the same thing. The same critical, cool, 
reasoning temper demanded in art order, grace, regularity, 
propriety. It insisted upon adherence to the probabilities of 
life; upon reasonable obedience to rules and models; it was 
shocked by irregularities of form, by too wide a departure 
from convention. In music the absurd unrealities of the new 
romantic opera were a source of endless criticism. You re- 
member those charming papers of the Spectator in which 
Mr. Addison makes delicious fun of Signor Nicolini and 
his new Italian opera of Hydaspes: the sparrows who be- 
longed in the orange grove, but would fly into the lady's 
chamber; the painted griffins who had become so expert in 
spitting fire, and the stage lion who, being a candle-snuffer 
by trade, had a bad trick of standing on his hinder paws all 
the time, and having unfortunately proved too much for the 
hero once or twice in the mortal combat, had to be super- 
seded by a country gentleman who plays the lion for diver- 
sion, but desires his name should be concealed. "Audi- 
ences," says Mr. Addison, "have often been reproached by 
writers for the coarseness of their taste; but our present 
grievance does not seem to be the want of a good taste, 
but common sense." 

On the tragic stage it was only with some difficulty that 
the audience of those days could endure the irregularities 
and license of such a Gothic writer as Shakespeare. And 
indeed they must have seemed strange when Betterton acted 
Macbeth in a tie-wig and knee-buckles, and Mrs. Brace- 
girdle received the raptures of Romeo in a hoop of twelve 
yards' circumference. On the other hand, Mr. Addison's 
famous tragedy of Cato, most unimpeachably correct and 
insufferably priggish of all plays, was accounted the highest 
reach of dramatic art, the crown of its author's fame. 

The one form of dramatic composition in which the age 
would seem likely to move freely and with success was the 
comedy of manners, in which the wit, the address, the 



142 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

humors of contemporary life are reproduced upon the stage, 
and in fact for a little time this was true. There is nothing 
more brilliant in English comedy than some of Congreve's 
work; but Congreve and his contemporaries ruined their 
drama by their salacious contempt for common morality; 
and there is no better proof of the moral health of English 
taste than the fact that this school of comedy which, meas- 
ured merely by intellectual brilliancy, promised so fair at 
the beginning of Anne's reign, sank into entire extinction* 
within thirty years. 

In no one of the arts does this passion for order and 
method appear more clearly or more instinctively than in 
architecture. It is curious to notice the violent dislike Eng- 
lishmen of the age entertained for Gothic architecture. The 
word "Gothic" itself began then to be used, not as applicable 
especially to architecture, but as a general adjective of re- 
proach which signified about the same as barbarous or medi- 
eval. The taste of the age was pleased with lightness, sim- 
plicity, proportion, broad curves, economy of line. A great 
Gothic cathedral seemed dark, vast, complicated; its de- 
tails were intricate and perplexing; it was covered without 
and filled within with an unmeaning profusion of ornament. 
Addison's architectural comments are often curious and 
suggestive. His papers on Westminster Abbey are, indeed, 
among the most beautiful specimens of his writing; it is evi- 
dent, however, that it is not the architectural impressiveness 
of the building that moves him, but the grand historical and 
religious associations of the abbey, and Its solemn me- 
mentos of our common mortality. His admiration for 
the great St. Paul's that Christopher Wren had just fin- 
ished was unbounded. Some of you will remember his 
papers on architecture in the Spectator. The Pantheon at 
Rome is certainly a very noble building, but modern Ideas 
get a shock on seeing it put into comparison thus: "Let 
any one reflect on the disposition of mind he finds In himself 
at his first entrance into the Pantheon at Rome, and how 
his imagination is filled with something great and amazing; 
and at the same time consider how little in proportion he is 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 143 

affected with the inside of a Gothic cathedral, though it be 
five times larger than the other ; which can arise from noth- 
ing else but the greatness of manner in the one and the 
meanness of manner in the other." 

In the account of his early travels Mr. Addison has a 
great deal to say of Venice, but not a single word, I be- 
lieve, for St. Mark's; while the great Cathedral of Siena 
only suggests the remark that, "When a man sees the pro- 
digious pains and expense our forefathers have been at in 
these barbarous buildings, one can not but fancy to him- 
self what miracles of architecture they would have left us 
had they been only instructed in the right way." 

Now these characteristics in the taste and temper of 
the age, which, as I have been trying to suggest in this rapid 
and sketchy way, are to be seen in all forms of thought, de- 
cided of course the character of its polite literature. 

This passion for reasonableness, for moderation, for 
good sense, for grace of form; this dislike of extravagance, 
of whatever seemed rude, or irregular, or uncultivated, all 
this is seen of course in letters better than anywhere else. 
You may see the attractiveness of the new civilization for 
the men of the time; their vast esteem for refinement, for 
the arts and graces of society. They wanted to get as far 
away as possible from the great ages of fanaticism and bad 
taste. Good breeding must express itself in letters. Society 
begins to talk in print; and it talks very charmingly. There 
is moderation and urbanity in what it says. If a man has 
anything to say, thought the Queen Anne men, let him say 
it so that well-bred men of wit and sense shall care to listen. 
A man certainly ought to be able to write as well as he can 
talk; and no man of breeding thinks of running into extrava- 
gance, long-winded rhetoric, or rhodomontade in his talk. 
Now the result of such a temper as this is that for the first 
time we have a good, serviceable, every-day prose style in 
English, — clear, flexible, racy, idiomatic, and not too far 
removed from the easy grace of conversation. It was an 
immense gain. Contrast the prose of the Queen Anne men 
with the prose that was written by the men of fifty years. 



144 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

earlier, say by Milton, Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor ; 
it is like a new speech. The prose of Swift or Addison is 
modern prose, — graceful, if it be Addison's, forceful if it 
be Swift's, — but in either case easy, simple in structure, self- 
possessed, with the varied but natural modulation of good 
conversation between man and man. And in spite of the 
occasional protest and example of such writers as De Quin- 
cey and Ruskin, who would carry prose into the province of 
oratory or poetry, I think it will be generally admitted that, 
as far as form goes, the prose of these Queen Anne men 
leaves little to be desired. To be sure, we get early speci- 
mens of this kind of prose before the close of the seven- 
teenth century, in the work of Locke and Dryden; but it was 
not until the time that we are considering that it can be said 
to have been popularized. During this Queen Anne time, it 
is remarkable how many men wrote well; how generally 
diffused was the habit of clear and effective, graceful 
expression. 

Doubtless there is in much of this writing a certain thin- 
ness, a glib assurance rather than any breadth of view or 
richness of suggestion. It may be plausibly urged sometimes 
that these men write so easily because they have so little to 
say. Yet to say little with clearness and charm is perhaps 
better than to say more with repellent obscurity of manner. 
The pamphleteer, the essayist of Queen Anne's time, had 
learned the rare art of making the most efficient use of his 
material. And before we ascribe the clearness of this 
Queen Anne prose to its shallowness, we must remember 
that the one man who was perhaps the most consummate 
master of English in his generation was no coffee-house wit, 
but the profoundest English philosopher of his century. No 
man has ever yet succeeded better in conveying profoundest 
meaning in most lucid graceful prose than Bishop Berkeley. 

With poetry, to be sure, the case was different. If you 
insist on an elevated imagination and a warmth of feeling as 
requisites of poetry, you will hardly find any poetry in the 
Queen Anne time. It has been the fashion sometimes, in- 
deed, to deny that Mr. Pope's famous verses are poetry at 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 145 

all. But that depends upon how you define poetry. Certainly 
they are a very different kind of poetry from that which 
Milton, or Shakespeare, or Burns, or Shelley wrote. And 
yet little Mr, Pope is as sure of his niche in our temple of 
fame as any of them. Indeed, if success consists in attaining 
completely what one aims at, in satisfying one's ideal, then 
I am not sure but Pope was the most successful of writers. 
Standards change. We value a poem now for its power to 
stir the emotions and to enlarge or uplift the imagination. 
In our definition of poetry we adopt Coleridge's antithesis 
between poetry and science, and fix the essential character- 
istics of poetry not in its form but in its subject and spirit. 
We have so given ourselves over to the romantic school that 
the very phrase "a didactic poem" sounds to us like a con- 
tradiction in terms. We insist that the poet should find his 
subject In the realm of emotion or passion and should see it 
through the Imagination, not through the cool, dry light of 
the intellect. But a poem in Queen Anne's time was first of 
all a work of art. It differed from other writing not pri- 
marily in subject but In form. Grace of manner, skill, per- 
fection of workmanship, conformity to recognized canons of 
taste, these were what the coffee-house critics of 17 10 ad- 
mired. The excellencies of this poetry, you see, are those 
which the intellect without the emotions is fitted to under- 
stand and appreciate. Neatness, point, epigrammatic brev- 
ity, careful balance of parts, skill in the turning of a phrase, 
wit in the narrow, modern sense, and In the broader sense In 
which Pope used the word, — good and quick judgment, — 
these are the ideals aimed at. Poetry is a kind of perfected 
rhythmic conversation, with the wit. Innuendo, allusion of 
the best conversation, — all elevated a little, pruned of Irrele- 
vant matter, and confined In regular verse. That is Pope's 
poetry, and Prior's. One may not call it poetry, and one 
may greatly prefer his Shelley or his Browning; but to have 
no relish of It would seem to argue some deficiency of appre- 
ciation. It has finish, the flavor of culture, the aroma of 
good society about it. Man Isn't a hero and an adven- 
turer; he belongs in drawing-rooms, and this, said our an- 



146 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

cestors, is the well-bred poetry he ought to read. See it 
sparkle ! 

However widely our tastes may differ about this Queen 
Anne literature, I believe we must all grant to it the virtues 
it professed. It was clear and sane. The opinions of these 
men were often shallow and often narrow; but they knew 
what they meant themselves and they could tell you. And 
really it is worth while to cultivate that virtue. I was read- 
ing the other day Mr. Swinburne on Mr. Rossetti's poetry; 
and this is what Mr. Swinburne said of it: 

It has the fullest fervour and fluency of impulse, and the impulse 
is always towards harmony and perfection. It has the inimitable 
note of instinct, and the instinct is always high and right. It carries 
weight enough to overbear the style of a weaker man, but no weight 
of thought can break it, no subtlety of emotion attenuate, no ardor 
of passion deface. It can breathe unvexed in the finest air and 
pass unsinged through the keenest fire. It has all the grace of 
perfect force and all the force of perfect grace. It is sinuous as 
water or as light, flexible and penetrative, delicate and rapid; it 
works on its way without halt or jar or collapse. 

What do you suppose Dick Steele or Joseph Addison or 
even that much maligned Queen Anne critic, John Dennis, 
would have said to such a rhapsody of words as that? Some 
of Mr. Addison's criticism, — on the Paradise Lost, for 
instance, — is certainly rather wooden, but it has the very 
great advantage over all such criticism as this, that it does 
mean something, and we readers of average intelligence may 
know precisely what it means. 

And for the poetry of the period we can claim a similar 
excellence. For my own part, I should certainly prefer the 
poetry of the early nineteenth century to the poetry of the 
early eighteenth century; and yet, in these days when so 
much stress is laid upon the picturesque, the suggestive, or 
even the mere musical functions of poetry, when Mr. Ad- 
dington Symonds thinks Shelley has realized the miracle of 
"making words altogether detached from any meaning the 
substance of a new, ethereal music," I say it is not alto- 
gether unpleasant to take up this old-fashioned verse whose 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 147 

first charm is clear and pithy meaning. And the matter of 
which this poetry is made up, if it be neither novel nor mov- 
ing, has at least that first mark of classic literature, univer- 
sality. The stuff of most of Pope's poetry, for instance, is 
nothing but a selection from the phenomena and the laws 
of society and of morals. Such material is familiar enough, 
certainly; all truths of conduct are familiar; but it is of 
perennial interest. The poets of that age could not clothe 
their material in imagery, for as I have been saying, it was 
characteristic of the age not to think in images, but to think 
in propositions; yet it is no mean art that can give to a great 
body of truths, social and moral, a final poetic form, clear, 
pointed, and vigorous. 

Such then was the general temper of the age of Anne as 
it found expression in politics and theology, in art and let- 
ters. But upon literature there were certain other causes 
operating which tended to the same results. One was the 
influence of France. The civilization of France during the 
seventeenth century, though hardly touching the mass of 
the people, was more brilliant than that of any other coun- 
try of Europe. The literature of France, indeed, during the 
period of the Renaissance was not so original, vigorous, and 
imaginative as that of England during the same time. 
France hardly had a Shakespeare or a Milton. But the 
literary art had been carried to a higher perfection, per- 
haps, in France than in England. The influence of the great 
Greek and Latin classics, when they were first popularly 
known in the sixteenth century, seemed to be quite different 
in England and in France. In England they stimulated 
imagination and curiosity; their history and legend filtered 
down through translations into the active minds of many 
men who like Shakespeare had small Latin and less Greek, 
and thus they co-operated with other causes and helped to 
set English literature upon a course of independent develop- 
ment. But in France they served rather as models to be 
admired and imitated. The result was the more rapid 
growth in France of a spirit of literary criticism and greater 
attention to literary form. In Queen Anne's time the French 



148 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

had attained for half a century and more that elegance and 
correctness which the English were aiming at. And the 
French, it goes without saying, seemed by nature to excel 
in just that clearness and point which the English at the time 
of Queen Anne most admired. It is hard to measure any 
such influence as this, and I think it has often been exag- 
gerated; but in the early years of the eighteenth century un- 
questionably it was very great. French was the language of 
diplomacy, of learning, of society, of fashion, of travel; 
every cultivated Englishman read it. The influence upon 
English literary manner was inevitable; and it flowed not 
so much from any one author, as from the general spirit and 
manner of French thought and speech. As Pope says, — 

We conquer'd France, but felt our captive's charms; 
Her arts victorious triumph'd o'er our arms; 
Britain to soft refinements less a foe, 
Wit grew polite, and numbers learn'd to flow. 

Literature was also affected, of course, by the peculiar 
constitution of society at the time. Now the most important 
social fact in England at the beginning of the eighteenth 
century was the growth of a great middle commercial class, 
who were rapidly growing wealthy by trade. Getting much 
of the wealth of the country into their hands, they were get- 
ting also that influence which wealth gives. They owned the 
greater part of the national debt which England had been 
piling up for twenty years. Their money was fighting Eng- 
land's battles. They were shrewd, quick-witted, with a good 
knowledge of men and things; and it was clear that they 
were likely to hold the balance of political power in Eng- 
land. Neither party could afford to overlook them. How to 
reach them, was the question. There were three hundred 
thousand of them within five miles of the Parliament 
Houses; but to report a word of what was said there was a 
crime, and the eloquence of Bolingbroke and Wyndham was 
never heard outside the walls of St. Stephen's. Nothing 
was left but to write for them. It was for them that the 
pamphlet was invented. It was for them that Defoe and 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 149 

Steele and Swift wrote, and wrote their best. Indeed, all 
three really belonged to that class themselves. I doubt 
whether the political influence of the press was ever so great 
as it was for a little time during the reign of Anne. The 
pen of Swift was literally mightier than the sword of Marl- 
borough. It was the natural result that men of letters should 
all be drawn into political life. With the single exception of 
Pope, every writer of any eminence during the reign of 
Anne — Defoe, Addison, Swift, Steele, Prior, Bolingbroke, 
Gay, Parnell, Arbuthnot, and all the rest — held some office, 
or was in some way actively connected with public life. 
This fact, too, of course, co-operated with the other causes 
I have mentioned to give to the literature of the age its clear 
and practical character. Such men would of necessity write 
like men of affairs who are addressing the people. 

But this great middle class needed to be entertained, too. 
It was largely for them that the Tatlers and the Spectators 
were written. It was coming to be an inquisitive reading 
class. It wanted to know about itself and about its betters. 
It had some relish of the best things in letters and art. Now, 
for the first time, the writer could depend on having a public. 
Remember, there was no book-buying public in England 
until about 1700. Then for the first time sprang up the race 
of booksellers. Everybody who has read Dryden remembers 
old Jacob Tonson, with his two left legs, his "leering looks, 
bull-face, and Judas-colored hair." 

The booksellers, Curll and Lintot, you know, play al- 
most as conspicuous a part in the story of Pope's life as 
Pope himself. But booksellers mean book-buyers, an audi- 
ence who will listen to the writer and pay him. Before 1700, 
if any writer made a living by his pen, — and very few did, — 
he must write for the stage, or he must depend upon the 
bounty of some wealthy patron. Shakespeare would seem to 
have got together a snug fortune by the proceeds of his 
theatrical property and by shrewd investments in real es- 
tate; but doesn't every school boy remember that Milton 
and his family received for the copyright of Paradise Lost, 
all told, £18 or $90? Dryden set his genius out to hire 



I50 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

for years by writing two plays a year — and mighty poor 
plays some of them were, as Pepys would say — to get bread 
and butter; and almost every one of his admirable prose 
dedications was aimed at the pocketbook of some noble pa- 
tron. But by the time of Anne an author might write for the 
public and find a publisher to pay him for it. Eighty thou- 
sand copies of Defoe's pamphlet, The True Born English- 
man, were sold on the streets of London. The daily circula- 
tion of the Spectator was about 4,000 copies, sometimes 
reaching as high as 13,000, and when the numbers were 
collected into volumes, more than 10,000 copies of each 
successive volume were immediately sold. Swift's most 
popular pamphlet ran through four editions in a week, and 
above 100,000 copies of Gulliver's Travels were sold in 
five years. When Lintot printed Pope's Iliad he issued 
a handsome subscription edition of 650 copies for the 
aristocracy, but he printed a cheap little duodecimo edition 
for the people, and he sold 7,500 copies of that within 
a few weeks. You couldn't sell so many copies of a new 
translation of Homer now. 

This popularity meant fame, you see; it was worth writ- 
ing for. Sometimes it meant money too. The first fortune 
made by any English writer solely by the sale of his works, 
I suppose, was that made by Mr. Pope from his translation 
of Homer. That work brought him the pretty sum of 
£9,000 — and money was then worth many times what it 
is now — which he, as we all remember, put into that charm- 
ing little villa of Twickenham, with its lawn and grotto, 
and shellwork, and all sorts of stiff eighteenth century 
bric-a-brac. 

Another thing that decided the character of the Queen 
Anne literature was the immense growth of London rela- 
tively to the rest of England. So far as literature is con- 
cerned, England from 1700 to 1740 practically meant Lon- 
don. In Queen Anne's time one-tenth the population of 
England and Wales lived within four miles of St. Paul's. 
The population of London is one-sixth that of England and 
Wales to-day; but there are now more large towns outside of 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 151 

London than there were then, and the means of communica- 
tion are so many and so rapid that what is said or printed in 
London in the morning goes all around the world before 
noon. Indeed, the growth of other literary centers, the in- 
crease in the means of spreading intelligence, and the change 
in English literary taste deprived London of its exclusive 
claim to a literary preeminence before the close of the cen- 
tury; but in Queen Anne's day the great mass of the active, 
intelligent, curious public were crowded into the metropolis. 
And I suppose the London population was more homogene- 
ous then than it is now. Extremes were not so far apart. I 
should think it probable that the average intelligence of Lon- 
don was higher, and the proportion of readers to its whole 
population greater, during the first third of the eighteenth 
century than it ever has been since. Now when a large por- 
tion of the reading public, and that the most intelligent por- 
tion, is thus gathered immediately around the center of gov- 
ernment and society, you have the most favorable conditions 
for the growth of a literature which shall deal in brief, rapid, 
effective fashion with the passing events of the day. The 
pamphlet of Defoe or Swift or the Spectator of Addison 
would be five days old before it could reach Chester or York; 
but it could be laid damp from the press on five hundred cof- 
fee-house tables in London and be read before night by fifty 
thousand people. In these circumstances literature inevit- 
ably became, as never before or since, a town literature. 
No other period of our literary history has linked itself 
by so many associations to the actual town or left so many 
memories of itself in almost every street. As one walks 
through that great, murky Babel of a London to-day with 
his head full of Mr. Gay's Trivia, or Mr. Addison's Spec- 
tator, or Dr. Swift's Journal, the imagination will easily 
paint for him that dim-lighted London of Queen Anne's 
day, its picturesque old street fronts, its hurrying crowd 
with knee-breeches and wigs and swords, its shouting chair- 
men that jostle you from the walk as they hurry on with my 
lady in her sedan to the masque or the play, her two link boys 
with lighted torches in advance, her two stout footmen with 



152 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

oaken cudgels tramping on by her chair windows; the blast 
of the horn and the creak and rattle as the Cambridge 
coach comes rolling down the Strand driving everything be- 
fore it, and reining up its smoking team at Locket's in Char- 
ing Cross, while its passengers, mightily glad to have 
escaped Captain Macheath on Horseley Down, unpack 
themselves, and the trim barmaid in white apron meets 
them at open door with smiling face. Somehow this 
Queen Anne London always seems more real to me than 
Queen Victoria's. The great dome of Paul's, a little 
more delightful, mellowed, and smoked than when it 
was new and staring white in Addison's days, is Queen 
Anne's church, and Addison's, and Sacheverell's, and 
Swift's, — doesn't old Queen Anne stand ever before it 
on a statue whose limp and stupid look is admirable? 
The Great Holborn Viaduct is thrown across the de- 
scent of Snow Hill now, but you can go down under it 
if you choose and walk up that gentle slope down which 
the Mohocks rolled the women they had headed up in bar- 
rels for this polite diversion. As you pass out of the broad 
square of Covent Garden, on the east side, under Inigo 
Jones' piazza, you will not forget that house just in front 
of you at the corner of Bow and Russell Streets. It's now 
a grocer's shop ; but in at that door and up that stair passed 
the wit and fashion of Queen Anne's time, for that was 
Will's Coffee-house, where you might see 

Priests sipping coffee, 

Sparks and poets, tea. 

Here in the corner by the fire stood great Dryden's chair, 
and here — if we may still believe the old tradition — came 
to see the great Dryden the youthful Pope, 

As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, 

[He] lisped in numbers, for the numbers came. 

Will's was the center of wit and letters until they migrated 
across the street to Button's, at 27 Russell Street. It's a 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 153 

fruit vendor's shop now; but It will always be to us the 
coffee-house where the great Mr. Addison held his court. 

You walk westward through the Strand and Pall Mall, 
and stand in front of the castellated gate of old St. James', 
and here perhaps rather than anywhere else do you feel 
yourself in Queen Anne's London. Inside these respectable 
and dingy walls she lived and she died. The house next 
door, in front of which stand always now a couple of red- 
coated sentries, is the town house of the Prince of Wales 
to-day, but it will always keep its old name of Marlborough 
House, and you will always remember that Queen Anne built 
it for her friend and crony, her Mrs. Freeman, the Duchess 
of Marlborough. When the two old ladies, one of whom 
had a very hot temper and the other a very sulky one, after- 
wards quarreled, as such persons usually do, the Queen 
would have been glad to get her house back again and the 
pretty corner of park on which she had built it; but she 
couldn't, and the great Duchess Sarah lived here, and died 
here at last, in spite of her plucky retort when they told 
her that only a blister could save her, — "I won't be blis- 
tered, and I won't die, either !" 

Stand with your back to St. James, and look up the 
street. At your right was the St. James Coffee-house, head- 
quarters of all the Whig Party, just opposite the Cocoa 
Tree, headquarters of all the Tories. In this street lived 
Addison. Parnell was in the lane leading off to the left. In 
Bury Street, first turn to the right, Swift had his first floor 
dining-room and bedchamber, at eight shillings a week, — 
"and plaguy dear 'tis," he says. The Queen Anne men and 
memories are all about us. 

But to think of the Queen Anne London makes one 
over-garrulous ; let me keep to my theme ! 

Such reminiscences may remind us of the last char- 
acteristic of this Queen Anne literature that I will name 
to-day. It is eminently a personal literature. It is true, in- 
deed, that all literary work of any value is, in an important 
sense, an expression of the personality of its author. It is 
precisely the prerogative of the man of original genius to 



154 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

pass truth and emotions through his own character and issue 
them with the stamp of his own individuality. Hence, in my 
judgment, all fruitful literary criticism must take into ac- 
count the personal character and surroundings of those au- 
thors whose work it would explain or estimate. But at no 
other period is this personal element in our literature so 
high as in the Queen Anne time. The literature of the 
time is a disclosure of the daily life of its writers. We see 
them in their habit as they lived, at the club, in the coffee- 
house, in the street, in the drawing-room. It was this com- 
mon, daily, rather mundane life in which they were most in- 
terested and of which they wrote. They keep back nothing. 
We are shown their follies, their vices, their charities. We 
come to have a real acquaintance with them. Don't you 
know Dick Steele and the eminently worthy and decorous 
Mr. Joseph Addison as well as you know your neighbor? 
Haven't we heard nervous, wiry little Mr. Pope recite his 
famous verses about Miss Termor's hair? And it seems 
only the other day that we caught a glimpse of the great Dr. 
Swift as his chairman set down the beetle-browed Doctor 
in his gown and bands at my Lord Treasurer's door. And 
herein resides a great part of the charm which most readers 
find in the study of this period. Here is a little group of 
writers, all living within a mile of each other in town; all 
interested in the same things; with one exception — Defoe 
— all personally acquainted with each other; and they take 
us into their confidence; after a little they come to have an 
interest for us largely independent of the purely literary 
value of their books. We care more for the men, indeed, 
than we care for their books; or rather, we care for their 
books chiefly because they introduce us so delightfully to the 
men. And to know the Queen Anne literature it is first 
necessary to get on familiar terms with the Queen Anne 
men. 

Such, so far as I have been able to sketch them in this 
rapid way, I conceive to have been the chief characteristics 
of the age of Anne, and of the literature it produced: a 
practical, reasoning, mundane temper; a deficiency of emo- 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 155 

tion and of imagination; a distrust of enthusiasm and all ill- 
regulated action, and a corresponding confidence in sense 
and judgment; a remarkable interest in all political and 
social matters. As a result, a clear and idiomatic prose con- 
cerning itself mostly with matters of immediate daily in- 
terest; a poetry finished, pointed, urbane; and everywhere 
a disposition to regulate life in accordance with reasoned 
standards, and to give to it the moderation and grace of 
good society. 

This general temper, of course, changed very rapidly 
after the middle of the century; indeed, we may see in the 
closing years of the Queen Anne period some indications 
of that reaction which at the close of the century culminated 
in a revolution in all departments of thought. Let me 
note, in a single word, one or two of these marks of 
reaction. 

One is a reaction from the hard and practical sense of 
the age to sentimentalism; an affectation of sentiment arid 
emotion to take the place of the real; and this in different 
kinds of literature and in varied ways. It may be seen, for 
instance, in Young's poetry, where, without a ripple of real 
emotion, there is a constant tumid swell and roll of mere dec- 
lamation, pompous reflections that are utterly dreary. The 
Night Thoughts is at once the hollowest and the most 
resonant of poems. 

Contemporary with Young's work and Pope's latest 
writing was Hervey's Meditations Among the Tombs; it is 
now so entirely forgotten that Mr. Gosse in his History of 
Eighteenth Century Literature doesn't even deign to 
mention it; but it is said to have been the most popular book 
of the century, no less than seventeen editions having been 
issued in seventeen years. Any readers of this generation 
who have looked into it have probably been surprised to find 
it one of the most florid of books, full of sophomoric dec- 
lamations of the very worst kind, and written in a tone of 
unctuous pathos very unedifying. In fiction a similar manner 
may be seen. Fielding represents the sturdy common sense 
of the age, but Richardson is morbidly sentimental, and 



156 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Richardson was the more popular. Sterne, a half generation 
later, is sentimentalism incarnate. 

The other mark of reaction I note is a growing dislike 
for the stifling air and the prim conventionalities of city 
life. Now and then a man begins to look outside the town. 
Before the death of Pope one may already hear some first 
words of that new gospel of nature so soon to be preached 
by Rousseau. Indeed, even Dryden had some momentary 
moods of fanciful admiration for that ideal age of nature 
and freedom, 

When wild in woods the noble savage ran, 

as his line has it. Pope had succeeded in writing the worst 
nature poetry in the world, and was only prevented by some 
merciful special providence from attempting what he called 
"Indian Pastorals." 

And already as early as 1726 we can see through all the 
academic diction of Thomson some of the beginnings of 
the vision and sympathy which by the close of the century 
were to find full expression in the poetry of Cowper and 
Burns, and of that greatest of all poets of nature, — Words- 
worth. 



THE LITERATURE OF THE AGE OF 
QUEEN ANNE 

II 

POLITICS, PARTIES, AND PERSONS 

One of Mr. Addison's pleasant gossiping papers in the 
Spectator begins thus : 

About the middle of last winter I went to see an opera at the 
theatre in Hay Market, where I could not but take notice of two 
parties of very fine women, that had placed themselves in the oppo- 
site side boxes, and seemed drawn up in a kind of battle array one 
against another. After a short survey of them, I found they were 
patched differently; the faces on one hand being spotted on the right 
side of the forehead, and those upon the other on the left. L 
quickly perceived that they cast hostile glances upon one another; 
and that their patches were placed in those different situations, as 
party signals to distinguish friends from foes. In the middle boxes, 
between these two opposite bodies, were several ladies who patched 
indifferently on both sides of their faces, and seemed to sit there with 
no other intention but to see the opera. Upon inquiry I found, 
that the body of Amazons on my right hand were Whigs, and those 
on my left Tories: and that those who had placed themselves in the 
middle boxes were a neutral party, whose faces had not yet declared 
themselves. These last, however, as I afterwards found, diminished 
daily, and took their party with one side or the other; insomuch that 
I observed in several of them, the patches, which were before dis- 
persed equally, are now all gone over to the Whig or Tory side of 
the face. The censorious say that the men, whose hearts are aimed 
at, are very often the occasions that one part of the face is thus 
dishonoured, and lies under a kind of disgrace, while the other is so 
much set off and adorned by the owner; and that the patches turn 
to the right or to the left, according to the principles of the man 
who is most in favour. But whatever may be the motives of a few 
fantastical coquettes, who do not patch for the public good so much 
as for their own private advantage, it is certain, that there are 
several women of honour, who patch out of principle, and with an 
eye to the interest of their country. Nay, I am informed that some 
of them adhere so steadfastly to their party, and are so far from 
sacrificing their zeal for the public to their passion for any particular 

157 



158 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

person, that in a late draught of marriage articles a lady has stipu- 
lated with her husband, that whatever his opinions are, she shall be 
at liberty to patch on which side she pleases. 

In this account of an odd mixture of fashion and politics 
I suppose Mr. Addison's playful humor has not exaggerated 
the facts at all, for there is abundant evidence to show how 
thoroughly the society of Queen Anne's time interested it- 
self in party politics, divided itself up in accordance with 
party sympathies, and how all literature, gossip, and even 
fashion were colored by party prejudice or preference. A 
large portion of the literature of the time is avowedly and 
exclusively political. It is concerned, moreover, with the 
details of party politics; very seldom does any of the politi- 
cal writing of the age, even the best of it, like Swift's, rise 
into the region of general principles. The writing of Swift 
never has the large wisdom of such a man as Burke; it is 
concerned rather with the immediate questions of the hour, 
with personal and partisan questions, and does not often 
bring to their solution the wider truths of economics or gov- 
ernment. So, too, the personal careers of all these men de- 
pended intimately upon the changing fortunes of the parties 
to which they belonged. Defoe, Steele, Addison, Swift, — 
the position and the work of every one of these men de- 
pended, at some of the most decisive junctures of their lives, 
upon the ups and downs of party politics. It seems desir- 
able, therefore, that, at the very outset of any study of these 
men and their writings, we should call freshly to mind the 
course of party politics during the reign of Anne, sketching 
rapidly the topics and the persons most prominent in the 
political movements of the time. 

The writers of Queen Anne's time all range themselves 
as either Whigs or Tories. But when we ask ourselves, what 
were the differences between them, what were the questions 
they disputed so warmly, we find it not so easy to answer. 
We cannot discover any real question at issue between the 
two parties. Each goes on abusing the other, but one cannot 
exactly understand the charges. The truth is, I suppose, that 
there were really no clear principles at issue between the 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 159 

two parties. The questions that once divided them had 
been pretty much settled by the logic of events; and yet the 
two parties lived on, divided by tradition, by differences 
upon matters of expediency, and by personal rivalries for 
place and power. It is very often so, you know, in political 
history. When a great political party has settled one issue, 
it doesn't die, but looks about for another; and between the 
settlement of the old issue and the discovery of a new one, 
there is usually an interval during which party lines are 
vaguely drawn, and you can hardly tell what principles are 
at stake. 

But it is to be noted that this is just the time when parti- 
san controversy is sure to be most active and rancorous. 
For being really pretty much agreed as to principles, the 
parties have to transfer the contest to persons, and personal 
controversy in politics as everywhere else is the most bitter 
of all controversies. Then, too, at a time when parties are 
not widely divided, persons can change sides, if it serve 
their own interest to do so, without much change of principle 
or doctrine; and such desertion always provokes bitter cen- 
sure, censure all the more bitter because the desertion can 
be plausibly defended. Dean Swift, for instance, once said 
in his own paper, the Examiner, "Let any one examine a 
reasonable honest man of either side, upon those opinions in 
religion and government, which both parties daily buffet 
each other about, he shall hardly find one material point in 
difference between them." And yet Dean Swift himself was 
the most terrible of party writers, and by almost all the 
Whigs was cursed as a renegade for a change of party 
which he could readily and effectively defend. 

But while there were no very clear questions of con- 
troversy between the Whigs and Tories of Queen Anne's 
time, it was still true that these two parties represented, as 
two great parties in a state almost always do, two attitudes 
of the human mind on public affairs ; the conservative and the 
radical; one represents motion, the other check; one holds 
to that which is old, the other wants what is new; one repre- 
sents authority, the other liberty. Both are necessary al- 



i6o AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

ways, and it is in the due equilibrium of power between them 
that the safety of the State consists. The Tory party was 
the conservative party; the Whig, the progressive. 

But to be more specific, the principal subjects on which 
parties had once actively differed, and still continued to 
differ in theory in Anne's time, were two. The first was the 
nature of the monarchy and its relation to the other parts 
of the government. The extreme Tories held that the King 
had a divine right to his throne, by virtue of his hereditary 
succession; and that this right was indefeasible, and im- 
plied the duty of unconditional obedience from the subject. 
The extreme Whigs held that the King was purely the crea- 
tion of the people, and held his office by act of Parliament. 
But then it would have been difficult to find many such ex- 
treme Whigs as these, or many such extreme Tories; and be- 
tween these extremes of opinion there was room for num- 
berless grades of approximates, and most people didn't 
trouble themselves much about it. The second and much 
more important subject of difference was the relation of the 
Church to the State and to Dissent. The Tories were 
mostly Churchmen and held that the interest of the Church 
and religion demanded more constant and detailed attention 
from the State, and more stringent measures to repress dis- 
sent. They believed in a close and thorough union between 
Church and State, and said, not unreasonably, that this 
would be impossible if the offices of the State were given 
to those who were not members of the Church. They al- 
ways called themselves by preference the Church party; 
Queen Anne never called them anything else. The Whigs, 
on the other hand, though many of them were good Church- 
men, apprehended less danger from Dissent and were more 
liberal towards it. It was to the Whig party that all the 
Dissenters belonged. 

There was another difference between these two parties, 
that was quite as important as any speculative difference of 
opinion, and that was growing more important every year. 
The most significant social fact of the time is the growth of 
a great middle commercial class who were coming to con- 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE i6i 

trol the rapidly increasing trade of England, getting wealth 
fast, and filling up the towns. At the bottom of much po- 
litical controversy between 1700 and 1750 was the undefined 
jealousy between this class and the landed class. It was 
trade against land; old aristocracy against new wealth; town 
against country. Now this commercial class almost to a 
man were Whigs; the landed gentry and their dependents, 
country squires and parsons to a man, were Tories. Sir 
Roger de Coverley, you know, is a good Tory; you remem- 
ber his indignant outburst in Westminster Abbey when they 
showed him the effigy of an English king the head of which 
had been stolen — "Some Whig, I'll warrant you; you ought 
to lock up your Kings better, they'll carry off the body too, 
if you don't take care." And if you've read Mr. Addison's 
Freeholder you will recall the Tory foxhunter who rode into 
the country one day with Mr. Addison, pulled up at the 
inn of his own village, whistled out his landlord and intro* 
duced him to Mr. Addison as a very good man who was, 
to be sure, so busy he hadn't time to go to church, but 
had helped pull down two or three meeting-houses. A 
very happy shire it was, said the jolly foxhunter, in his 
account he gave of it while supper was a-getting, — scarce 
a Presbyterian in it. 

Supper was no sooner served in, than he took occasion from a 
shoulder of mutton that lay before us, to cry up the plenty of 
England, which would be the happiest country in the world, pro- 
vided we would live within ourselves. Upon which he expatiated 
on the inconveniences of trade, that carried from us the commod- 
ities of our country, and made a parcel of upstarts as rich as men 
of the most ancient families of England. 

Needless to say Mr. Addison was a Whig; he manages 
afterwards, you remember, to bring his foxhunter up to town 
and convert him. 

What the attitude of these two parties toward each 
other was at the opening of the reign of Anne, and how 
they came into that attitude we may see by a moment's 
reference to some of the familiar facts of the preceding 
reigns. The two parties were really created (forty years 



1 62 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

before Anne came to the throne) by the Act of Uniformity 
in 1662, — that act by which the possibility of uniting a vast 
majority of all Englishmen into one broad, liberal, national 
Church was lost forever. The Act of Uniformity, you re- 
member, required of every minister an unqualified assent to 
the whole of the Prayer Book, and enforced it upon all pub- 
lic worship whatsoever; and by a further clause it exacted of 
all ministers, as a condition of retaining orders, a solemn 
profession of belief that it was unlawful for any cause what- 
soever to take up arms against the Crown. This act threw 
one fifth of all the clergy out of their livings in a single day; 
united Presbyterians and Independents, fusing all Dissenters 
into one solid body against the Church and the extravagant 
prerogatives of the Crown. Thus we have the nuclei of two 
parties, one composed of extreme Churchmen putting into 
their creed very high notions of the nature of the monarchy; 
and the other composed of moderate Churchmen with the 
whole body of Dissenters. 

The two parties were solidified by the agitation over 
the Exclusion Bill. King Charles II hadn't any religion to 
speak of, and didn't want any; but he did want a deal of 
money; and when his Parliaments were very slow to give it 
to him and very anxious to find out what he did with it, he 
went to the most Christian King, Louis XIV of France, for 
it. But if King Charles had no religion, his brother James 
had; he was an avowed and zealous Roman Catholic, and 
as Charles had no legitimate children, was like to be King 
of England soon. That was the outlook, — Englishmen re- 
duced already by the pusillanimity of their king to a position 
of dependence upon Roman Catholic France, and with the 
prospect just before them of having a Romish king them- 
selves. In those circumstances the agitation that arose in 
favor of the Bill to exclude James from the succession to 
the throne was such as England had never seen before. Pe- 
tition after petition urging the Bill poured in from the party 
of moderate Churchmen and Dissenters, for all hated and 
dreaded Rome and France more than they hated and 
dreaded anything else. But what should the Church party 
say? How could they, for any cause, consistently advocate 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 163 

the exclusion of the lawful heir from the throne that would 
belong to him? There was but a step between excluding the 
king of to-morrow and deposing the king of to-day. The 
latter was not only treason but sacrilege, violation of the 
law of God as well as the law of man; was not the former 
something very like it? From this party, therefore, came 
an equal multitude of documents formally declaring their 
abhorrence of these new doctrines as subversive of the true 
idea of the monarchy, and as ruinous alike to Church and 
State. The rival parties were commonly known as Petition- 
ers and Abhorrers, but these awkward terms soon gave way 
to the shorter slang names of Whig and Tory. 

But the Tory party was hardly formed before it found 
the ground cut out from under its feet by the Revolution of 
1688. James the King by grace of God, to whom resistance 
was unlawful, was gone on his travels; ignominiously fled, 
and, by aid of a fishing-boat, got over to France. Alive, well 
and sound, and calling himself King of England still, but un- 
fortunately for all practical purposes of kingship not at all 
usable now. What then? Was he to be recognized as king 
still, and England to get on without sight of any monarch 
for a time? Hardly a practicable scheme that, — especially 
since it seemed probable that his only son, a stout infant of 
a few months, who would have a divine right to the throne 
after him, would grow up as bad a Catholic as his father, — 
yet, when it came to a settlement of the matter, nine Tories 
out of every ten in the House of Commons could see no 
better way to fit their principles to the facts. 

Here was James' eldest daughter, Mary, with her hus- 
band, William, on the spot. If that four months' infant were 
not the son of James, — and the Tories tried hard to believe 
he wasn't, — why then perhaps Mary might take the crown 
which by a convenient fiction her father might be said to 
have abdicated. But Mary wouldn't take it alone; there was 
no help for it; it was either no king at all just now or this 
Dutch William who had no divine right to anything in Eng- 
land except his wife, Mary. To this the Whig party was 
urging them; to this they had to come. William was made 
King of England by statute of Parliament. 



1 64 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

There is nothing spectacular in a revolution like this in 
which no powder is burnt and no blood is spilt, and which 
might seem to consist principally in King James going 
out of the back door of Whitehall and King William coming 
in at the front; but it meant the practical refutation of one 
whole set of political ideas, and final decision that the power 
of the people is supreme, and the King is only their chief 
minister. 

It might have been supposed that the Tory party would 
have little further reason for existence, now that the 
doctrines had been so completely refuted by the logic of 
events. But you know men by no means give up their prin- 
ciples as soon as they find they will not work. If our prin- 
ciples come into conflict with facts, why so much the worse 
for the facts. So it was here. Some few of the Tories, es- 
pecially among the clergy, consistently refused to take the 
oath of allegiance to the new king at all; some satisfied 
their consciences by ingenious mental distinctions between a 
king de facto and a king de jure; and a good many took the 
attitude of the Vicar of Bray: but the Tory party still re- 
mained a solid center of opposition to William all through 
his reign. Plain country folk who didn't understand much 
of politics always had a vague notion that the present con- 
dition of things was but a temporary arrangement, and 
that sometime the King must come to his own again. It 
took seventy-five years to get that quite out of the heads of 
the English people. 

And this Tory opposition constantly strengthened dur- 
ing the later years of William's reign. For William though 
a wise and just, was hardly a popular king. He was cold 
and phlegmatic; he was a Dutchman; men said he was fight- 
ing the battles of his own country and taking English men 
and money to do it with. So the Tory party gradually 
gained in influence, until during the last year of his life they 
got into a majority and were able to manage him about as 
they pleased. Meantime, the old King James had given up 
the struggle and was slowly dying in France; William's 
wife, Mary, was dead, and all parties were agreed that 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 165 

after the death of William the other daughter of James, 
Anne, should come to the throne. 

This was the state of affairs the year before the acces- 
sion of Anne, when suddenly the great War of the Spanish 
Succession broke out. The King of Spain, a decrepit and 
half-witted old rake, was dying without heirs. Who was to 
be King of Spain after him? A famous treaty to which most 
of the great nations of Europe were parties provided that, 
in this event, the crown of Spain should go to a prince of 
the House of Austria; but on his death-bed the old King 
was induced by somebody to make a will giving his whole 
dominion to Philip of Anjou, who was the grown-up grand- 
son of the great Louis XIV of France. Would Louis, in 
spite of his treaties, accept the will, unite the crowns of 
France and Spain and make himself master of Europe? — 
all Europe was waiting to see; it had not long to wait. 
Louis received the Spanish ambassador one day in the great 
audience room at Versailles with the famous words, "There 
are no more Pyrenees." And all Europe was up in arms 
in a week — all but England. William was in agony; the 
work of his life was undone; he entreated, he stormed even; 
but the Tory party had him in their power and they didn't 
want any more of William's Dutch wars. 

But just then Louis made a mistake; after the death of 
the old King, James, he formally proclaimed his young son 
James, the Pretender, as King of England, and pledged him 
his support. This was of course to declare war on England, 
and in self-defense England must resist. William and the 
Whigs were delighted; the Tories reluctantly assented and 
the great war began. On the one side was France, with a 
little help from Bavaria and from Spain; on the other, Eng- 
land, Holland, Austria, Savoy, and the rest of Spain. With 
the very opening of hostilities William died, and our Queen 
Anne came to the throne. That was the way her reign 
began: the Tories in power; Anne herself, so far as so 
flaccid a person could be said to have any politics, a Tory 
too ; a Tory ministry and a Tory queen with a great Whig 
war on their hands. 



1 66 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

This Queen Anne — who was she? Let me confess that 
the picture of Anne that lives in my memory and seems to 
me really suggestive of her character is drawn not from 
statue or portrait, but from a much more vulgar source. 
Among the numerous chapels in Westminster Abbey is a 
little lumber room in which are locked up a number of wax 
figures of the kings and queens of England. Made first, at 
the death of the originals, I believe, and after the funeral 
pomps were over, set up here and shown to the public at 
a penny a head, — till some half century and more ago, when 
the dean turned the key on them. Well, Anne is there in 
her habit as she lived, portly, stout, in large red health, 
though with a somewhat puffed and helpless look. This is 
the Anne of my imagination, — a sluggish, inefficient, torpid 
soul, able to animate but feebly so much royal avoirdupois. 
Seldom has fortune entrusted to so small a mind the conduct 
of so great affairs. 

It is impossible to throw any pride or luster of royalty 
about her. No brilliancy of parts or statesmanship, had she 
herself, and she had no appreciation of them in others. 
She was without humor and without taste. She had no 
lightness or versatility of mind. One thinks of her as a fat, 
dull, heavy, generally good-tempered body. Her temper, 
however, wasn't always of the best. Meekly stupid when 
she was in good humor and sulkily stupid when she was in 
bad humor, says Macaulay in his smart way. She had little 
judgment to guide her in the choice of her advisers. She 
chose friends without discrimination and discarded them on 
ignorant prejudice. Like dull people generally she had an 
immense regard for decorum, and once, it is said, dismissed 
a minister because he came into her presence in a tie-wig 
instead of a full-bottom. Moreover, as is often the case 
with stupid people, she could be invincibly obstinate on 
occasion; and the very thickness of her intellect made it im- 
possible to dislodge her prejudices. She was kind to her 
friends, but as Swift said, she never had a stock of amity 
sufficient for more than one person at a time. 

Yet Anne always had a kind of popularity with the Eng- 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 167 

lish people, who never came very near her. She was an Eng- 
lishwoman for one thing, and the people were tired of a 
Dutch monarch. "I know my own heart to be entirely Eng- 
lish," she said in her first speech from the throne, — or some 
minister was bright enough to make her say it. Then she 
had those homely domestic virtues which the English, to 
their credit, so generally reverence. The one person in Eng- 
land duller than she, her husband, Prince George of Den- 
mark, was a fat, incorrigible, blubbering little drunkard, 
who hadn't wit enough when occasionally sober to make 
either friends or enemies; but Anne loved him as if he had 
been St. George himself, and as his asthma and dropsy 
increased and the little man, who was over sixty, grew daily 
fatter and scantier of breath, Anne watched by him in an 
agony of suspense, and, when he dropped out of existence 
and nobody else in England cared or hardly knew, poor 
Anne was inconsolable. Her thirteen children were all dead 
before she became queen, and a good many people felt a 
sympathy for the lonesome and childless old lady. 

Then, too, though she had some rather questionable 
habits, she really meant to be pious. The one clear motive 
that it is possible to trace in her conduct is a love for the 
English Church in which she had been brought up. It was 
this that attached her to the Tory party, and that party 
already knew nothing would so influence the Queen as the 
cry, "The Church is in danger." 

This was the Queen of England. But of course such a 
queen as this didn't really govern England. The real sover- 
eign of England during the first eight years of Anne's reign, 
was her great general, the Duke of Marlborough. The war 
put this great duke virtually at the head of affairs at once. 
I think the Duke of Marlborough was the greatest military 
genius England ever produced — greater even than Welling- 
ton. He had the best marshals of France against him, but 
he never lost a battle. The great English general was really 
commander-in-chief of all the allies and the one man whom 
France dreaded. For fifty years after the war the French 
nurses used to frighten the children into obedience by telling 



1 68 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

them Marlborough was coming. And the Duke was a man 
of wonderful fascination of manner and great address. 
Men used to say he was as powerful in the court as in the 
camp. Certainly he exerted almost as much influence winters 
when he was at home in Parliament as summers when he 
was abroad in the field. But he was not a very trusty man, 
I think. He had played fast and loose with James and 
William in a not very manly way, and for my part, I can 
never feel sure that all through Anne's reign he would not 
have changed sides or even made himself useful to the Pre- 
tender if he had been quite certain it would have been for 
his own interest to do so. The fault his enemies were always 
throwing in his teeth was his avarice. It is true that the 
great man was very fond of money. As the war went on he 
got vast sums : the great palace of Blenheim alone that Mr. 
Vanbrugh built him cost the government near a million 
pounds; but he never got enough, and finally his enemies said 
plausibly, though I think it wasn't quite true, that the Duke 
of Marlborough wanted to prolong the war that he might 
keep on filling his pockets. The master of Europe was cer- 
tainly very careful of his pennies: the night before the great 
battle of Blenheim when he sat in his tent with some officers 
examining plans of the field of to-morrow's battle, and an 
orderly brought in two lighted candles and placed them on 
the table, the great general rose and thriftily snuffed out 
one of them with his finger. When later, in the days of his 
unpopularity a gentleman who looked very like him, was 
mistaken for him on the streets in London and was like to 
be hustled, he satisfied the mob by turning to them and say- 
ing: "Good people, I can easily convince you I'm not the 
Duke of Marlborough; in the first place, I have only two 
shillings about me; and secondly, they are very much at 
your service." 

In a great war money Is even more necessary than men; 
and Marlborough was very fortunate in that his most in- 
timate friend, Sidney Godolphin, was at the head of the 
treasury and managed those matters for him at home while 
Marlborough fought battles abroad. Godolphin was a 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 169 

rather heavy, coarse, lumbering sort of man, who found 
his most congenial pleasure at the cock-pit and race-course, 
but he was one of the greatest masters of finance England 
had ever seen. I don't know that it has had any greater 
since. He was closely connected with Marlborough, for his 
son had married Marlborough's daughter. Both he and 
Marlborough were Tories when Anne's reign began, and 
held the highest places in her ministry for eight years. 

But there was one person in England who was more 
powerful than the great Duke of Marlborough. The great 
Duke conquered Europe, but he was himself the humble 
subject of his wife, Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlbor- 
ough. One can see that woman now and almost hear her, — 
her small, sharp-featured face, agile figure, alive to her 
finger ends, and her omnipotent tongue. For she wasn't 
for softness famed and sweet submissive grace, this Duchess, 
and didn't rule by artful compliance but rather vi et armis'. 
Whether the Duke really loved her or was only afraid of 
her, the world can never quite make out; his constant letters 
to her, very devoted and very submissive, are among the 
oddest things I know of. At all events, he was very proud 
of her and found her services at home for him worth half 
a dozen armies. For when Queen Anne came to the throne 
this Duchess had been for some years her closest friend. 
They were inseparably intimate. They laid aside their 
titles in their correspondence and the Queen was "My dear 
Mrs. Morley" and the Duchess, "My dear Mrs. Freeman." 
Of course in such a friendship the Duchess had the best 
of it. By such a shrewd and commanding nature as hers, 
the poor old Queen seemed entirely manageable. In serious 
fact the political history of England for half a dozen years 
was decided by this imperious little woman who stood be- 
hind the throne. 

These then are the persons most prominently in view 
when Anne's reign began. For some years the war was 
the absorbing subject of attention. It was, as I said just 
now, a somewhat curious state of affairs. The Tories were 
in a majority in the House of Commons; Marlborough and 



1 70 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Godolphin, Tories, were at the head of a Tory ministry, 
and the Queen herself so far as she was anything was a 
Tory, while the war was a Whig war. Yet the two parties 
at first were not so very widely separated. The Tories did 
not enter into the war so heartily as the Whigs, yet they 
recognized it as necessary, and both parties supported it. 
But a successful war is usually popular and strengthens the 
party that favors it most. When, therefore, Marlborough 
began to win his great victories, the Whigs began to grow 
stronger at home, and when an election fell (1705) just 
after the famous victory of Blenheim, the Whigs carried 
it and returned a large majority to the House of Commons. 
Marlborough and Godolphin were heartily in favor of the 
war, and, as they found they couldn't get on without the 
support of the Whigs, they gradually came over from the 
Tory to the Whig side, and by 1706 were voting with the 
Whigs regularly. And what was more, the Duchess of 
Marlborough went over too. The Whigs naturally didn't 
like Tories in the ministry; it seemed hard the Tories should, 
be entrusted with Whig measures, and get the credit of a 
victorious war which they only went into because they 
couldn't help it. The Queen therefore found herself obliged 
to drop one Tory minister after another. In 1706 she 
put in two that were destined to become very famous pretty 
soon, — Mr. Robert Harley, and young Mr. Henry St. John, 
afterward to be made Lord Bolingbroke. Mr. Harley was 
only a very moderate Tory and Mr. St. John was young 
and brilliant, and the Queen hoped she might keep them 
in the ministry. But in 1708 the Whigs had another ma- 
jority in Parliament and the Whig ministers, Marlborough 
and Godolphin among them, positively refused to serve 
unless their Tory colleagues were turned out, and so Harley 
and St. John had to go, and for the first time the ministry 
was altogether Whig. But though the Whigs seemed quite 
successful In 1708, in fact they were nearing a total defeat, 
and the most famous change of ministry that ever happened 
In England was at hand. 

In 1709 the war was growing unpopular. After eight 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 171 

years of victories, it seemed no nearer ending than when 
it began, and people were beginning to believe that Marl- 
borough and the Whigs didn't wish to end it at all. The 
country land-owners especially were firm against it, for 
they said it made them poor and the trading Whigs rich. 
So soon as ever a town Whig could get a thousand pounds 
together he bought some of the public securities, which of 
course he didn't have to pay any taxes on, while the land 
had to pay him a handsome rate of interest every year. 

They went to war to keep out the Pretender ; but I sup- 
pose a good many Englishmen all through Anne's reign 
thought he would be king at last after all. When Anne's 
last child died, just before she became queen, the Parliament 
had decided that should she die childless, the crown should 
go to a granddaughter of her great-grandfather, the Elec- 
tress Sophia; now a rather dull old lady of eighty, princess 
of a tiny German state about whom people knew or cared 
nothing; or if she should die before Anne, to her son, 
George, about whom people knew or cared even less. It 
seemed a long way to go after a King of England, 
a poor place to find one; and a good many Tories who 
didn't want to declare for the Pretender, wouldn't have 
been sorry to see him in England after Anne should 
go, and were beginning to be doubtful about the wis- 
dom of fighting so long to keep him out. Anne herself 
was known to have a soft spot in her heart for this 
unlucky half-brother of hers, and if he could have changed 
his religion, I think he would have unquestionably be- 
come King of England. Then, too, the Tories, since 
they had gone into a minority, had discovered that the 
Church was in danger. By the famous Test Act, passed 
thirty years before, it had been provided that no person 
could hold any civil office who should not take the sacrament 
according to the form of the Church of England, and de- 
clare his disbelief in the Romish doctrine of transubstantia- 
tion. The object was of course to shut out both Dissenters 
and Romanists from all office; but it was found that there 
were some Dissenters whose consciences would allow them 



172 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

to take the sacrament now and then from the hands of an 
English priest, and by this occasional conformity, qualify 
for office. A bill to prevent such occasional conformity, 
as it was called, was urged by the Tories, and, for three 
consecutive sessions of Parliament, it was pushed with the 
utmost obstinacy, and when it was at last found impos- 
sible to pass it, the Tories spread through the country the 
vague feeling that the Church was being betrayed by the 
Whigs. Through the country people all had a dim notion 
that something very wrong was going on : there was an end- 
less war and it wasn't easy to say what for; the Queen was 
growing old and nobody knew what was to come after her; 
a great many bad Whigs were in power, taxes were high, 
and the Church was in danger, so the parson said. 

But what I suppose had more to do with the change 
of ministry was the fact that Duchess Sarah and the Queen 
were not getting on well together of late. It seems a little 
odd to say that the history of all Europe was changed 
because a stupid old woman quarreled with a snappish 
old woman; but really it wasn't far from the truth. It 
is really surprising that the rupture didn't come sooner. The 
Queen had a kind of dull decorum and stupid stateliness 
which were sorely tried by the familiarities of the Duchess. 
The idea at last began to soak into Queen Anne's mind 
that she was being managed, and she didn't like it. Then 
the Duchess made one great mistake. Among the crowd 
of her hangers-on was a certain Abigail Hill, some distant 
poverty-stricken cousin, a mild, inoffensive, chirruping body. 
It occurred to Duchess Sarah to make this Abigail Hill 
of service as a maid of honor. But this Abigail Hill had 
a pair of eyes in her head, a quick wit, and considerable 
talent for back-stairs politics, and being one of those quiet, 
helpful bodies "never in the way and never out of the way,'* 
she soon made herself vastly serviceable to Anne. The 
Queen found it pleasanter to manage a maid than to be 
managed by a duchess, and the result was that before 
Duchess Sarah realized what was doing, she found her- 
self quite out of favor, and her poverty-stricken cousin. 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 173 

who had by this time been married to a Mr. Masham of 
the court, installed in her place. Now this Mrs. Masham 
was some sort of relation of Mr. Harley, the moderate 
Tory I mentioned a while ago; and Mr. Harley was not 
slow to avail himself of this opportunity. The Queen was 
tired of the Marlboroughs; she was doubtful about the 
war; she was frightened about the Church. Couldn't Mrs. 
Masham find opportunity to advise her that the safest way 
would be to dismiss Marlborough, get a new ministry, dis- 
solve the Parliament, and begin anew? This was in 1709. 
The Queen was slowly making up what mind she had to take 
this advice, when an event happened which made a great 
hubbub of excitement over the country, and hurried her 
on to a decision. In the fall of 1709 a sermon was preached 
in London by a rather foolish parson named Doctor Sach- 
everell. He was a High Church minister of very mediocre 
abilities who seems to have had none too much of learning 
or piety, but made up for both by his assurance; and having 
a good manner and rather striking delivery he enjoyed a 
certain vulgar popularity. Preaching on what he was pleased 
to call the perils among false brothers in the Church, this 
man took occasion to urge some of the highest notions of 
royal prerogative ; and to denounce in unmeasured terms all 
those who didn't maintain them. The cry of "The Church 
is in danger" had never been sounded quite so shrilly. 

It was a foolish sermon and the ministry would have 
done best to regard it as such and let it alone. But in an 
evil moment they chose to impeach him before the House 
of Lords. It was the spark that set things ablaze. The 
Tories accepted it as a challenge. The clergy were indig- 
nant. Sacheverell posed as a martyr. The trial came off in 
1 7 10, and London was in a whirl over it. Sacheverell was 
attended by the chaplain of the Queen. The ladies had his 
portrait in their prayer books and on their handkerchiefs. 
The mob hustled everybody who wouldn't shout for him, 
and improved the opportunity of tearing down several 
meeting-houses. In the end, though he was convicted, his 
penalty was only a nominal one, and when the silly parson 



174 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

left London after his trial, his journey into the country was 
a triumphal progress that set the church bells ringing all 
over England. 

It was plain that the Queen could make up her mind 
now. In the later summer of 17 lo she dissolved Parlia- 
ment to call a new one. And the elections went over- 
whelmingly Tory everywhere. The Queen dismissed the 
Duchess, who was so indignant that she threw away her gold 
key, and, when she was turned out of her apartments in St. 
James, tore down the mantel and carried off the brass 
locks. Godolphin had to give up his treasurer's staff and 
all the Whigs went out of office. Marlborough it wasn't 
so easy to get on without, but he lost his place next year. 
England had a Tory queen, a Tory ministry, a Tory House 
of Commons, and next year to make all complete, Anne took 
the unprecedented step of creating twelve new Tory peers 
at a stroke, and thus made a Tory majority in the Lords too. 
"Do you vote singly or by your foreman?" asked the 
Whig Lord Wharton when they came into the House for 
the first time. The revolution was now complete, the last 
great Tory administration was fairly in. It was this ad- 
ministration that remained in power the remaining four 
years of Anne's reign, and was the last and only great 
Tory ministry for more than fifty years. 

At the head of it were two men very different from each 
other and not well adapted to work together, — Robert 
Harley and Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke. Mr. 
Harley, whom Anne soon made Lord Oxford, was a slow, 
cautious, good man of business, honest, well-disposed, but 
of no statesmanship. He made an impression on people 
by a heavy serious air of wisdom and moderation, but it 
was difficult to find out whether he had any clear views on 
any subject or not. Before any difficult question he had the 
sage and non-committal air of the Sir Roger de Coverley 
who thinks "there's much to be said on both sides." Men 
called him a trimmer, but the truth was he never could 
exactly make up his own mind on most matters of state. 
Queen Anne complained that he seemed to go into gen- 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 175 

eralities, and she couldn't understand him; I suppose he 
didn't well understand himself. When he and his party 
were out, he knew he wanted to be in, and was rather 
shrewd in his schemes to get in ; but once in, he didn't know 
just what to do with the power put into his hands. Then, 
too, he was the most dilatory of mortals; the greatest pro- 
crastinator alive, said his best friend. Dean Swift. He had 
the hesitating caution of a man who didn't fully know his 
road. On the question which was now beginning to agitate 
all minds, what was to come after the Queen, he was careful 
not to commit himself, but waited for events. 

The other great minister, Bolingbroke, was the opposite 
of all this. He was an extreme Tory, not from principle — 
for of principles he had none — but from expediency. He 
was in fact a Jacobite and was certainly concerned — no one 
knew or ever will know how deeply — in schemes to bring 
in the Pretender. He was brilliant, versatile, rapid, rather 
than wise or temperate in judgment. In his earlier life he 
had made himself proficient in all the fashionable vices of 
his time, and rather prided himself on keeping them well 
in practice, though it cost him his health and his character. 
He aspired to be the Alcibiades of his age ; orator, states- 
man, poet, gallant, and to shine in all at once. He wrote 
with equal flippancy a letter of intrigue and a dispatch on 
which the fate of Europe depended. But such brilliancy is 
bought only at the expense of the sounder qualities of states- 
manship. 

It was evident, at all events, that two such men as 
Harley and Bolingbroke couldn't long get on together. 
They did not. The new ministry had to do something to 
avert the danger to the Church of which so much had been 
said before they came in; and so they passed the act for- 
bidding occasional conformity, and ordered fifty new 
churches erected in London. They were built by Wren and 
Gibbs and you see the spires of them wherever you go in 
London now. But their great task was to end the war. It 
was really for this that they had been elected. But to end 
the war wasn't so easy a matter. England was only one of 



176 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

four great allied powers who had been fighting France, and 
none of the other three was ready for peace yet, so that 
England was forced into the unhandsome position of desert- 
ing her alHes. Moreover, now that Marlborough was dis- 
missed, the most dangerous enemy of France was out of the 
field and the demands of France rose very much : three years 
before Louis would have made peace on almost any terms; 
now he was reluctant and exacting. And more than all this, 
some of the extreme Tories, among whom probably was 
Bolingbroke, as the Queen drew near her end, thought it in- 
creasingly probable that the Pretender would come in after 
her death, and hesitated to put into the articles of peace any 
terms that would make that too difficult for him. The Tories 
indeed were in an awkward position. If they were true to 
the Church, they must keep him out. They found it hard 
to keep either article of the creed without breaking the 
other. In such a position of affairs most of them, like 
Harley, thought it best to proceed cautiously and decide on a 
policy when forced to. They distrusted Bolingbroke, for 
they knew he would try to do something brilliant, and they 
never could tell what it would be. And so as the negotia- 
tions for peace dragged on, my Lord Bolingbroke and my 
Lord Oxford grew farther and farther apart. Bolingbroke 
took affairs pretty much into his own hands, and when the 
treaty was at last signed in 17 13, the two ministers were 
thoroughly estranged. Shrewd little Mrs. Masham, who 
was managing the Queen, all this time had been choosing 
between the ministers. Her cousin, Mr. Harley, gave her 
a good deal of advice, but he didn't give her much money; 
but my Lord Bolingbroke, who seemed to have a great deal 
of money and very little conscience in the use of it, had kept 
her purse well filled, and sent her brother. Jack Hill, off on 
a handsome expedition against Quebec, where you remember 
he made a mess of it. So Mrs. Masham concluded she 
would go with my Lord Bolingbroke. 

In the summer of 17 14 the poor old Queen was evi- 
dently near her end, though no one expected the end to come 
quite so suddenly. "Her Majesty's gracious person grows so 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 177 

stout," says a contemporary letter, "that she cannot take her 
accustomed exercise, while she indulges herself somewhat 
too freely at table." She was tormented by the wrangling of 
the ministers; she naturally liked the heavy Harley and was 
suspicious of the brilliant Bollngbroke; but at last urged on 
by Mrs. Masham and irritated by Harley's indifference, she 
surrendered to Bollngbroke. What should happen after she 
was gone was now the question that everybody was asking 
with the feverish anxiety that came from the certainty that It 
must soon be answered one way or the other. The old Elec- 
tress Sophia died in the early summer and George, the Elec- 
tor, her son, was now the Hanoverian heir. The Tories, 
even the moderate ones like Swift, were of the opinion that 
before her death the Tory or Church party should be so 
strongly entrenched in power that even if the Elector should 
come to the throne, he would be unwilling to dispossess 
them; while If the Pretender should succeed, he would be re- 
quired to give full guarantee for the security of the English 
Church, although he did not enter that communion himself. 
But Harley was dilatory, disinclined to positive or sweeping 
measures, distrustful of the more extreme Tories, and dis- 
trusted by all parties. Bollngbroke, on the other hand, 
though of course he still made no open profession of favor 
to the Pretender, had evidently come to the conclusion that 
he would come in, and he made all his calculations for that 
event. He had even designated the members of the first min- 
istry under the new king. But his plans were frustrated at 
the last minute. 

On the night of Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of July, 17 14, 
there was a long and angry cabinet meeting. The Queen, It 
is said, quarreled with Harley; there were high words, and 
before it was over, the Queen took the white staff of office 
from Harley into her own hands, and Indignantly dismissed 
him. That was Anne's last cabinet meeting; the excitement 
of It killed her. Next morning she had a slight stroke of 
apoplexy and took to her bed. From that day to this it Is 
said no monarch of England has ever attended a meeting 
of the cabinet. Bollngbroke was left supreme; it was evi- 



178 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

dent the crisis was only a few days away. He made out a 
list of new ministers, almost all Jacobites, at the head of 
them, Bishop Atterbury, the rankest Jacobite in London. 
But they were never to be appointed. The Queen was 
stricken on Wednesday. The country was in an agony of 
suspense. Marlborough, who had been in exile, was waiting 
in Ostend to do no one knew what. Bolingbroke seemed 
ready. But he was outwitted at last. Among the Tories was 
a shrewd, long-headed man who had been watching things 
and keeping still, the Duke of Shrewsbury. He was much 
liked of Anne lately, but Bolingbroke was shy of him. Now 
the white staff of treasurer, which the dying Queen had 
taken from Oxford Tuesday night, she had not yet given 
to any one else, when on Friday morning a meeting of the 
Privy Council was called. Then as now, no councillor was 
expected to attend unless he had received a special summons, 
though having a legal right to do so. Bolingbroke had 
picked his men and thought he was sure of them all. They 
had hardly met out at Kensington and the news of the 
Queen's condition had just been received, when the doors 
were opened and in walked two Whig noblemen, Argyle and 
Somerset, and said that, knowing the danger of the Queen, 
they had hastened, though not summoned, to render all as- 
sistance in their power. The Duke of Shrewsbury, who was 
evidently expecting them, arose quietly and thanked them 
for their interest; and then to the astonishment of the 
Tories, the two Whigs, who had taken seats, suggested 
that in view of the danger of the Queen, the post of Lord 
Treasurer be immediately filled, and that the Duke of 
Shrewsbury be recommended to Her Majesty for that office. 
Astounded at the quiet assurance of these men, the Jacob- 
ites did not see how to oppose it, and at noon that day the 
dying Queen placed the white staff in Shrewsbury's hands. 
Bolingbroke saw that his game was out. Saturday the city 
was put under arms; word was sent to the Elector of Hano- 
ver; the Pretender's cause was lost. Sunday morning at a 
little before noon the heralds proclaimed: "God save his 
Gracious Majesty, King George I." The time of Queen 



LITERATURE OF AGE OF QUEEN ANNE 179 

Anne was over. The Earl of Oxford was removed on 
Tuesday; the Queen died on Sunday. "What a world is this 
and how does fortune banter us !" wrote Bolingbroke to 
Swift next day. 

With the death of Anne my story really ends. With that 
event indeed begins a new chapter in English history. It 
wasn't merely the accession of a new line; it was the final 
triumph of one party and the final defeat of the other. *T 
see plainly the Tory party is gone," said Bolingbroke two 
days after the death of Anne. Its most characteristic doc- 
trines: the divine right of kings, the duty of implicit obedi- 
ence, the virtual independence of the King over the Parlia- 
ment, the supremacy of Church over State, — all had been 
triumphantly refuted by the hard logic of events. Not that 
no one held those opinions any more; on the contrary Boling- 
broke was probably right in saying that three-fourths of 
the people out of town held them vaguely still; but they 
were hopelessly inoperative. For the logic of Tory senti- 
ment led to Jacobites, and Jacobites meant a Roman Catho- 
lie monarchy. 

The result was that after the accession of the House of 
Hanover, a small portion of the Tory party became active 
Jacobites, went over to France and joined the Pretender as 
Bolingbroke did, or stayed at home and plotted for him; but 
the great majority of them gave up the struggle and retired 
from politics altogether. When the party emerged with 
some prominence a generation later, it was a new party with 
the old name. The Whigs had it all their own way, and 
after some quarrels among them the control of the govern- 
ment in 171 7 fell almost entirely into the hands of that 
shrewd man, Robert Walpole. King George I was a great 
awkward, sleepy, bulky though not unkindly nor altogether 
witless, German, who couldn't speak a half dozen words of 
English. For the first time he made it evident that the Eng- 
lish could get on quite as well with a wooden King. Quite 
content to rule, he left the government to his minister, Wal- 
pole. So long as Walpole let him comfortably alone, fur- 
nished him money enough to satisfy his vulgar avarice and 



i8o AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

kept the Duchess of Kendall's pockets full too, he was con- 
tent to allow his minister to manage affairs as he would. He 
couldn't speak any English, and Walpole couldn't speak a 
word of German, and their very limited intercourse was car- 
ried on in atrocious Latin. When George I died and George 
II came to the throne in 1727, it was merely changing a big, 
good-natured German for a little, waspish German, that 
was all. Walpole governed still. His long ministry is im- 
portant in the development of English commerce, colonies, 
society; but it had little political history, and we may dis- 
miss it altogether for it had almost no influence on litera- 
ture. Walpole himself was a big, coarse, fox-hunting squire, 
who had no taste or knowledge of letters, and not a cent 
of money to waste on them. Swift and Gay and Pope dis- 
charged some of their fiercest satire upon him, but they 
might as well have tried to worry a rhinoceros with a pop- 
gun. Some contemptuous or indifferent reply was all the 
notice they could provoke from "Bob, the poets' foe." Let- 
ters fell at once into neglect, and it was under Walpole that 
Johnson slaved and Savage starved. Government patronage 
of men of letters and the close connection of politics with 
literature closed when Anne died; and I may therefore close 
my survey then. 



THE LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT 



THE figure of Jonathan Swift has for the student of 
literary biography ^ an interest such as attaches to no 
other man of letters of the Queen Anne time. And 
this not merely because he was the most strenuous and orig- 
inal genius of that age. His public career abounds in strik- 
ing dramatic situations, and provoked bitter controversy 
that has lasted ever since; while the story of his private life 
is tinged with some of the colors of romance, and ends at 
last in the most somber tragedy. To Swift himself his 
career seemed a series of defeats. Towards the close of his 
life he wrote to Bolingbroke,^ "I remember when I was a 
little boy I felt a great fish at the end of my line which I 
drew up almost on the ground; but it dropped in, and the 
disappointment vexes me to this very day, and I believe it 
was the type of all my future disappointments." In truth it 
would seem an ill star that presided over this man's na- 
tivity. With a native scorn and dread of dependence, he was 
born into the narrowest poverty. With abilities greater 
than those of any man of letters in his time, and social 
powers that made him admired even more than he was 
dreaded, he was nevertheless doomed to receive fewer of 
the rewards of life than fell to any of his rivals, and to 
pass the greater part of his days in a country he despised. 
With affections naturally strong and tender beyond most 
men's, he was destined by a cruel irony of fate to find those 
affections sought where they could never be bestowed, and 
to pass his days without the solace of the dearest relation- 

^ This essay on Swift, originally designed for the introduction to a pro- 
jected volume of selections in the Athenaeum Press Series, never published, 
has been slightly altered and rearranged to fit the present volume. [L. B. G.] 
'April 5, 1729. Works (Scott's 2d ed., Edinburgh, 1824), Vol. XVII, 
P- 253. 

181 



1 82 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

ship of life. With an almost extravagant admiration for 
sanity and homely vigor of thought, he lived all his life in 
terror of the inevitable advance of mental disease, and 
finally was forced to pass through the dismal stages of in- 
sanity and idiocy before the kindly dismissal of death. 

II 

Nor did Swift's ill-fortune end with his life. He has 
been very unlucky in his biographers, though their number 
and long succession attest to the interest the story of his 
life has always excited. The earlier attempts at a biography 
are especially inadequate and unjust. The Earl of Orrery, 
a priggish egotist, who made the acquaintance of Swift as 
late as 1732, published a vain and spiteful book, Remarks 
upon the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, ondy 
six years after the dean's death. Good, but rather dull, Dr. 
Delany came to the defense of Swift, in his Observations 
upon Lord Orrery's Remarks, published in 1754. Delany 
had known Swift intimately since about 17 15, and his book 
is a valuable storehouse of characteristic anecdote and rem- 
iniscence; but it is a defense rather than a biography, and 
does not pretend to give a detailed account of Swift's life 
or an impartial estimate of his work. Dr. Hawkesworth, 
dullest and most pompous of essayists, prefixed to a new 
edition of Swift's Works a Memoir (1755) which contained 
no new facts and no valuable opinions. The same year, 
one Deane Swift, son-in-law of Mrs. Whiteway, Swift's 
cousin and housekeeper, answered both Orrery and Delany, 
in an uncommonly silly book, which is chatter from cover 
to cover. To complete the list of works written shortly 
after the dean's death, we must add the Memoirs (1748) 
of Mrs. Pilkington, a vulgar adventuress with a kittenish 
vivacity and trickiness of manner, whose book is a curious 
farrago in which lie and truth are vexatiously mixed. 

In the next generation Dr. Johnson's Life (1781) in 
the Lives of the Poets, is stiff, unsympathetic, and adds little 
to our information; but at all events it contains no nonsense 



JONATHAN SWIFT 183 

and still may be called one of the best of the shorter sketches. 
Then in 1785, with great flourish of trumpets as the final 
life, appeared the Life by Thomas Sheridan. This Sheridan 
was the son of an old friend of Swift, and the father of 
Richard Brinsley Sheridan: he seems to have had his fath- 
er's blundering arrogance and his son's shiftlessness without 
the brains of either one. His Life is a tedious, inaccurate, 
garrulous book. If to this list we add a short Inquiry into 
the Life of Swift (1789) by George Monck Berkeley, — 
grandson of Bishop Berkeley, — we shall have most of the 
books upon Swift written during the eighteenth century. All 
of them, with the exception of Johnson's, were written by 
persons of mediocre ability, and no one of them can take 
rank as an adequate and impartial life. 

In 1 8 14 appeared the Life by Walter Scott, forming 
afterwards the first volume of his edition of Swift's works. 
Scott's clear and flowing narrative continued to be until quite 
recently the best account of Swift's career; but, while he had 
gathered considerable new matter, Scott was too much in 
haste to test his facts or to digest them, and his work, there- 
fore, is occasionally inaccurate, and on most of the disputed 
questions of Swift's life, it shows hesitation or uncertainty 
of opinion. A few years later, 18 19, a valuable life of 
Swift was written by William Monck Mason of Dublin. 
Mason effectually consigned his work to oblivion by writing 
it in villainous English, choking a thin strip of text in a 
thicket of notes, and then thrusting the whole into the mid- 
dle of a stodgy quarto. The History and Antiquities of the 
Church of St. Patrick. But he was a laborious and accurate 
scholar, and his portentous body of notes is a storehouse of 
facts of the utmost importance to the student of the life of 
Swift. Mason was an enthusiastic defender of Swift: but 
the general verdict was still the other way. The essayists — 
save Hazlitt — and the historians have every one his fling at 
the great satirist. Jeffrey sums him up with ready assurance 
as "an apostate in politics, indifferent in religion, a defamer 
of humanity, the slanderer of the statesmen who served him, 
the destroyer of the women who loved him." "Essentially 



1 84 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

irreligious from a vulgar temperament," says De Quincey 
with his usual recklessness of phrase, "an abominable, one- 
sided degradation of humanity." "The haughtiest, the most 
vindictive of mortals," says Macaulay, "He had," says 
Lord Stanhope, tartly, "a thorough knowledge of the baser 
parts of human nature — for they were his own." Even so 
kindly a cynic as Thackeray belabors the dean with such 
epithets as "bully," "bravo," "outlaw," "Yahoo," and be- 
lieves that he was tormented with a life-long consciousness 
of his own religious insincerity. 

But, in the long run, posterity is just. A change in the 
judgment upon Swift is marked by the appearance of the 
first — and only — volume of the Life by John Forster, in 
1875. Mr. Forster's style is sometimes operose, and his 
vast admiration for his subject leads him occasionally into 
a kind of Boswellian diffuseness and detail; but his patient 
industry in the collecting and sifting of materials, and his 
evident determination not to be misled either by prejudice 
or by enthusiasm in his search for the exact truth, promised 
to make his book the standard life of Swift. Unfortunately, 
he died shortly after the issue of his first volume. The ma- 
terials he had gathered were, however, put at the disposal of 
Sir Henry Craik for his Life of Jonathan Swift (1882). 
Sir Henry Craik has reached conclusions different from 
those of Mr. Forster on a few matters, — especially on the 
vexed question of the marriage to Stella, — but on the whole 
he gives the same favorable estimate of Swift's character 
that Mr. Forster had promised. That estimate has been re- 
peated by later writers, like Mr. Moriarty and Mr. Churton 
Collins. In fact it has now become the general one. Few 
critics to-day would repeat the reckless charges of political 
treachery, religious hypocrisy, general misanthropy so freely 
made against the great dean seventy-five years ago. 

Ill 

Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, November 30, 1667. 
Both his parents were of English stock; and he always pro- 



JONATHAN SWIFT 185 

tested that he was Irish only In the accident of his birth. He 
was a posthumous child, his mother having been left a 
widow some eight months before his birth. His father was 
the seventh or eighth of ten brothers, only the eldest of 
whom, Godwin, seems to have been a man of enough energy 
to command marked success. This Godwin was a lawyer. 
He had come over to Dublin early in life and by energy in 
his profession, and by repeated marriage with a series of 
heiresses, he had accumulated a handsome fortune. His 
younger brother, Jonathan — father of the future dean — 
followed Godwin to Dublin; but he had not the vigor or 
shrewdness to repeat the elder brother's success. He picked 
up such scraps of legal business as he could find, obtained 
by the influence of his brother an appointment as steward of 
the Inns of Court, married a bright but penniless young 
Englishwoman, and died at the age of twenty-five, leaving 
her only an annuity of twenty pounds a year. 

It was to Godwin Swift that the young widow naturally 
turned for aid to rear her son. At the age of six the boy, 
Jonathan Swift, was sent to Kilkenny School at the charges 
of his uncle Godwin. At about the same time, his mother 
left Ireland to live with her own family in Leicestershire; 
and mother and son would seem to have seen each other but 
little for the next fifteen years. After nine years at Kil- 
kenny, Swift was entered (1682) at the University of Dub- 
lin. Swift's university life was always a sore spot in his 
memory. The assistance of his uncle, though probably ade- 
quate to his needs, was not very generous, and apparently 
was not sweetened by a gracious manner of bestowment. 
"He gave me the education of a dog," said Swift, rather 
too bluntly, years afterward. But to his haughty temper any 
assistance would have been galling. He always had a mor- 
bid dread of dependence of any kind. Nor was he likely to 
care much for the university. A young man of keener relish 
for learning, if his pride had been wounded by poverty, 
might have withdrawn himself from his companions and 
with haughty moroseness buried himself in his books. Sam- 
uel Johnson did that, at Oxford, a half century later. But 



1 86 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Swift never had the scholar's temper in any high degree. 
All through life, he was satisfied only when in the thick of 
affairs. He prized learning only as a means to practical 
ends; and the dull routine of the university curriculum 
seemed to him quite out of relation with life. It was not 
mastery of books he wanted, but mastery of men; and at the 
university mastery of men was quite impossible to an awk- 
ward sizar. It is probable, indeed, that the early biographers 
were over ready to pronounce Swift a dunce in the university. 
Mr. Forster has fished up from oblivion a leaf out of the 
college roll, containing the record of Swift's examinations, 
which shows that he did well in his classics, and not so ill as 
some of his classmates in his other studies. Dull, we may be 
sure, Jonathan Swift never was; but restless, angry, and idle. 
He himself said, later in life, that "he was so much discour- 
aged and sunk in his spirits that he too much neglected some 
parts of his academic studies, for some parts of which he 
had no great relish by nature . . . : so that when the time 
came for taking his degree of Bachelor, although he had 
lived with great regularity and due observance of the stat- 
utes, he was stopped of his degree for dullness and insuffi- 
ciency; and at last admitted, in a manner little to his credit, 
which is called in that college, speciali gratia." ^ The truth 
seems to be that he would study only what he liked, and 
that he found very little which he liked. In the Latin 
classics and in history, however, he read carefully, espe- 
cially during the later years of his stay at the uni- 
versity. He took his Bachelor's degree in 1686 and had 
nearly completed three years of further residence when the 
university was broken up by the troubles attending the 
Revolution, and he was forced to leave Dublin. Not know- 
ing where to turn, he went to Leicestershire, to stay for a 
time with his mother. 

The months he spent in Leicestershire could hardly have 
been happy ones. He had just passed his twenty-first birth- 
day. His university career was ended. Angrily throwing 
off the sense of dependence under which he had lived thus 

^Autobiographical Anecdotes, Works, Vol. I, pp. 509-10. 



JONATHAN SWIFT 187 

far, he eagerly looked out for some chance at the work and 
the prizes of life. But every door seemed shut. With a wit 
such as no other young man in England was master of, an 
admirable genius for practical affairs, and a proud con- 
sciousness of his parts, he could see no way of setting his 
powers at work. In these circumstances he decided to act 
upon a hint from his mother. She was a distant relative of 
the wife of Sir William Temple, and it was at her suggestion 
that Swift applied to that great man for employment. The 
application was favorably received: and thus, in 1689, for 
lack of anything better to do, Jonathan Swift came to reside 
at Moor Park in the family of Sir William Temple. 



IV 

Sir William Temple was a very famous man. He had 
earned in his earlier years a reputation as a diplomatist. He 
had negotiated the Triple Alliance. He had arranged the 
royal match between William and Mary. He was a great 
man, but he knew when to leave off. Always studious of his 
own safety, he would attempt no task of doubtful issue, and 
accept no position of personal risk. He took no chances. 
Accordingly, when danger thickened before the Revolution, 
having done one or two great things, he prudently decided 
to retire on the strength of them. He had a natural taste for 
a little gardening and a little literature; a bit of romance in 
his youth had been followed by a most quiet and happy do- 
mestic life; and through all those troublous years from 1680 
to 1688 no impulse either of duty or of ambition could move 
him from his library and his orangery to the agitations of 
public life. When William came to the throne he offered 
his old friend, who was then living at Sheen, the position 
of Secretary of State; but Temple declined and withdrew 
still further away from London to his estate of Moor Park 
in Surrey. On this secluded estate, with its dignified manor- 
house, its canals and gardens in the trim Dutch style, and 
wide heathery commons and lonesome woods encircling all, 



i88 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Temple passed the rest of his life. "The measure of choos- 
ing well," says Temple at the close of one of his most 
charming dilettante essays,^ "is whether a man likes what he 
has chosen; which, I thank God, has befallen me. ... I 
have passed five years without ever going once to town." A 
reserved, decorous, sometimes just a little pompous old man, 
who had a king come down to see him now and then, and 
never lost among his cherry trees the grand air he had 
learned in courts. In his shadow one sees the pale though 
pleasant figure of Lady Temple, and Temple's widowed 
sister, Lady Giffard. That is the family. 

Such was the scene of dignified retirement into which 
was now ushered young Jonathan Swift. He could hardly 
have found it congenial. He never had much respect for 
dignities and he always hated retirement. With the ex- 
ception of two periods of absence in Ireland he was a mem- 
ber of this household until Temple's death in 1699. On the 
whole they can hardly have been happy years. We need not 
believe that, as Macaulay says, he lived in the servants' hall 
and sat at the second table; later biographers have shown 
that to be only one of Macaulay's bits of picturesque. He 
seems to have been at first Temple's amanuensis and reader, 
later his private secretary, and at last his confidential ad- 
viser and intimate friend. But at best it was a relation of de- 
pendence under which the eager pride of the young man 
chafed sorely. The heavy decorum of Temple, who as he 
grew older grew more and more like Polonius, must often 
have been well-nigh intolerable to a young fellow who was 
always inclined to regard the stately conventionalities of 
life as no better than solemn shams. "Faith," growled 
Swift, years afterward, "I've plucked up my spirits since 
then; he spoiled a fine gentleman." Traces of the disease 
which made him restless and irritable all his life can already 
be seen in these early years. But what was worst of all, his 
position with Temple gave him no access to that active life 
in which he longed to play a part. Never was there a young 
man more ambitious, a temper more restless and hungry 

* Of Gardening. 



JONATHAN SWIFT 189 

for power. But what could he do, shut up with a superan- 
nuated statesman who was playing at Greek and gar- 
dening? 

Yet there were compensations. Temple's excellent li- 
brary was always at his command; and he did a vast amount 
of that various and unsystematic but eager reading which 
is probably the best reading a young man can do. And he 
was perhaps as much indebted to Temple's counsels as to 
Temple's books. Always interested in affairs, Swift was 
watching keenly the game of contemporary politics; and 
Temple, who had known every player and every move in 
that game for more than twenty years, found a complacent 
pleasure in acting as his mentor. In the later years of their 
intimacy Swift, as he says himself, was "trusted with affairs 
of great importance," chief of which was a private message 
of advice to King William on the matter of his veto of the 
Triennial Bill. It was to Temple's extended political con- 
nections also that Swift owed his introduction to a few of 
the prominent men of the day. King William himself was 
an occasional visitor at Moor Park, and promised the young 
Irish secretary whom he met there some employment; but 
he never did anything more for Swift than to teach him to 
cut asparagus in the Dutch fashion. On the whole, these 
years with Temple were no ill schooling for the part Swift 
was later to play in the political history of his time. More- 
over, he was learning the use of his weapons; he was teach- 
ing himself to write. He tried verses first, — Pindaric odes 
after the stilted fashion of Cowley. They were very poor 
verses, — hard prose, inflated, deranged, mangled almost be- 
yond the possibility of recognition. He sent some of this 
stuff to Dryden; everybody was sending to Dryden then, and 
one shudders to think how much balderdash the great critic 
must have gone through. But Dryden's familiar verdict in 
this case must have been easy and quite safe, "Cousin Swift, 
you will never be a poet." The prediction was verified. 
Swift lacked utterly the first great requisite of the poetic 
character, the sense of beauty. Indeed, he seemed to have 
something like the opposite of that, a quick sense of ugliness 



190 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

and deformity; and though he wrote, first and last, a good 
many verses, he never wrote any poetry. He was wise 
enough not to try it again; but he constantly exercised him- 
self in that art of prose composition of which he became so 
great a master. As he afterwards said, he "writ and burnt, 
and writ and burnt again, upon all manner of subjects, more 
than perhaps any man in England." Before the close of the 
century he certainly could write a stronger prose than any 
man in England. 

Swift finally decided to go into the Church. It is possible 
that in other circumstances he might have chosen differently. 
He was ambitious of power, and could he have had the aid 
of wealth and social connections, might have preferred some 
more direct avenue to public life. But let it not be thought 
that he was driven into the Church, as a last resort, by pov- 
erty or indolence. He was not the man to cry, "Put me in 
the priest's office that I may have a piece of bread." On the 
contrary he had a morbid fear of such a charge; and it was 
only after the possibility of that reproval had been removed 
by the offer of a sinecure civil position from Temple, that 
he consented to take orders. His education, his connections 
fitted him for the Church. His moral convictions were 
strong, and his sense of duty decided. He did his duty in 
the Church, as he conceived that duty, faithfully all his life 
long. From the day he took orders till his death his con- 
stant thought, his most strenuous endeavors, were given to 
the service of the Church of England. In those days of the 
Sacheverells and the Burnets, when one great political party 
always called itself by preference the Church party, the 
office and work of the ministry was more largely political 
than we now conceive them; and Swift may be excused if his 
attention was mostly given to the public and political side 
of his work, and if he looked eagerly for advancement in 
the calling he had chosen. Yet it should be remembered 
that, throughout his career, whether in his little Irish living 
where, as the story goes, he read the service to his solitary 
clerk beginning, "Dearly beloved Roger, the Scripture 
moveth you and me in sundry places," or in the great cathe- 



JONATHAN SWIFT 191 

dral of St. Patrick's, it cannot be said that he ever omitted 
the conscientious performance of the distinctively clerical 
duties of his office. Doubtless he was not in all respects well 
fitted for that office. He was never at his best in the pulpit. 
He lacked that charity that suffereth long and is kind, that 
hopeth and endureth. And he knew it; and doubtless often 
had doubts as to the wisdom of his choice. But we need not 
believe, as Thackeray rather meanly suggests, that he was 
tormented by the consciousness of a life-long hypocrisy. He 
was not driven by poverty or servility to enter a profession 
he did not respect, or to teach a faith he did not believe. It 
was in 1694 when he made his choice. He parted — not very 
amicably — with Temple and went over to Ireland to be or- 
dained, thus closing his second period of residence at Moor 
Park.^ 

His absence lasted only about two years. He was given 
the living of Kilroot, a beggarly little parish in a poverty- 
stricken district where there were hardly more than a dozen 
families and those mostly Presbyterians, with a tumble-down 
hut for a church, and a living of scant one hundred pounds a 
year. As far as any possibilities of active life were con- 
cerned, he might as well have been with Robinson Crusoe on 
his island. It was but natural that when Temple urged him 
to come back, he turned over his parish to a vicar, and 
came. He remained at Moor Park this time until Temple's 
death. 

These last years of his stay at Moor Park were more 
pleasant than the first. He was received by Temple now as 
an equal and not as a dependent. Having decided his pro- 
fession, he was no longer harassed by uncertainties as to his 
career. Once a priest, always a priest. Moreover, he now 
began to exercise with some confidence his marvelous pow- 
ers as a writer. His first satire. The Battle of the Books, 
though not published until 1704, was written during these 
years. An idle controversy had arisen among French writ- 

* In 1690 he had gone over to Ireland in the vain endeavor to find em- 
ployment there, and, returning to Leicestershire, had spent some months with 
his mother before he could bring himself, at the close of 1691, to go back to 
Temple. 



192 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

ers of the age of Louis XIV as to the comparative value of 
ancient and modern literature. In an evil hour Temple in- 
troduced the discussion to English readers in an essay on 
Ancient and Modern Learning in which he took the position 
Chaucer indicates in his quatrain, — 

out of olde feldes, as men seith, 
Cometh all this newe corn fro yeer to yere; 
And out of olde bokes, in good faith, 
Cometh all this newe science that men lere. 

Modern writers draw all their best, he said, from the an- 
cient; modern learning was mostly got out of libraries, not 
out of life. But his essay has little to recommend it to us 
except the charm of its genteel loftiness of style. Temple 
wrote like a gentleman, but unfortunately he wrote very 
unlike a scholar. With the calm assurance too often accom- 
panying that little knowledge which is a dangerous thing, 
he asserts that modern learning and letters are inferior 
in interest and value to ancient, and undertakes to show that 
the older a book is, the better it is. This latter thesis he in- 
cautiously exemplifies by citing the spurious Epistles of 
Phalaris as at once the oldest and the best specimen of this 
kind of writing. Temple was answered courteously enough 
by William Wotton, a young Cambridge scholar; but his 
unlucky slip with reference to the Epistles of Phalaris ex- 
posed him to a more formidable antagonist. Richard Bent- 
ley, who was already the best classicist in England, in an 
examination of a new edition of the Epistles just issued by 
Temple's friend, Charles Boyle, took occasion to heap merci- 
less ridicule upon the scholarship of a gentleman who could 
mistake the forgery of a Greek rhetorician in the first cen- 
tury for one of the oldest books in the world. It was at this 
juncture, when Boyle and Atterbury and Smalridge were 
rallying for a reply to Bentley, and a very pretty quarrel 
was on, that Swift came to the defense of his patron. He 
was quick to see his first opportunity for a telling personal 
satire. Bentley's arrogant swash-buckler figure, in particu- 
lar, made an excellent butt for the young fellow to tilt at. 



JONATHAN SWIFT 193 

He set the ancients and moderns fighting each other, and 
told the story of their conflict in high Homeric fashion. Of 
course the moderns have the worst of it, and their leaders, 
Wotton and Bentley, come to grief most ignominiously. To 
readers of to-day The Battle of the Books is probably not 
one of the most interesting of Swift's works : but it is one 
of the most characteristic. Swift knew little about the 
critical question in dispute between the scholars, and cared 
less : the whole controversy seemed to him an excellent ex- 
ample of the humbug and self-satisfied pother of a bookish 
scholarship, of all the solemn fuss that is made over the rub- 
bish of critical learning that hasn't any relation to life. The 
satire is the first of his many attacks upon the consecrated 
dulness of pedantry. It is written, moreover, in the viva- 
cious and defiant manner of his early years, crowded with 
humorous images, and contains some passages — like the 
famous apologue of the spider and the bee — which set uni- 
versal truth in homely allegory as no one but Swift knew 
how to do. To Swift himself The Battle of the Books must 
have been a proof of his own powers. He wrote no more 
Pindarics. He was already at work on his next and greatest 
satire, The Tale of a Tub. 

When Temple died in January, 1699, Swift was left to 
push his fortunes as best he could. He went over to Ireland 
as chaplain of Lord Berkeley, one of the Irish Lords- 
Justice, who promised him preferment. But when, a few 
weeks later, the deanery of Derry fell vacant, the secretary 
of Berkeley coolly informed Swift the place would be given 
to another unless he would bid a thousand pounds for it. 
"God confound you both for a couple of scoundrels," said 
Swift; and waited for something that could be had without 
the price of simony. In February, 1700, he accepted the 
living of Laracor, with two small adjacent parishes, worth in 
all about two hundred pounds a year. He continued to reside 
for some months longer as chaplain with Berkeley, but in 
1 70 1 assumed charge of his parish at Laracor. Although 
much absent from it, he called this place his home for the 
next twelve years. 



194 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 



Swift was followed to Laracor by one person whose 
friendship had already begun to call out whatever was ten- 
der in his rugged nature, and whose story was ever after- 
wards to be told in connection with his. The friendship of 
Swift and Stella is probably the most famous in English lit- 
erary history; but much needless mystery has certainly been 
thrown about it. Twelve years before, when Swift first came 
to Moor Park he found there, in attendance upon Lady 
Giffard as a kind of companion, a Mrs. Johnson, whose 
husband. Temple's steward, had been dead several years, 
and who had with her two daughters. The younger of these 
daughters, Esther, when Swift first met her, was, he says, 
a girl of six years; it seems she was seven, just learning to 
read and not talking quite plainly yet. We have no details 
of the early friendship, but we may safely conjecture that 
the eager Master of Arts of twenty-one looked not unkindly 
upon this little maid, who was the only person having any 
spirit of youth in all that solemn and rather priggish house- 
hold. We know that he taught her to read, helped her in 
her copy books, and learned some of her childish speech so 
well that he never forgot it to his dying day. Any other 
relation than that of something like big brother and little 
sister would have seemed absurd to either of them then. 
But when Temple died both of them were ten years older. 
The fourteen years that separate seven and twenty-one are 
a wider interval than the fourteen years that separate seven- 
teen and thirty-one. Stella was now a young lady, and 
Swift was still a young man. Yet it seems clear that, what- 
ever it may have been to her, to Swift their relation was the 
same it had been at first. To him, at least, that relationship 
never seemed changed. This girl had grown to womanhood 
under his instruction; he had watched her reading, he had 
come to be her adviser and nearest friend; but there is not 
a scrap of evidence that his regard for her was other than 
the wise and tender solicitude of a guardian or an elder 



JONATHAN SWIFT 195 

brother.^ After the household of Temple was broken up, 
Stella went over to Ireland; partly because, after the second 
marriage of her mother she no longer had any home In Eng- 
land, while she had some little property In Ireland; but prin- 
cipally, as was no secret, that she might be near her friend 
Swift. She was accompanied by an elderly relative, Mrs. 
DIngley, a kind of mute In the story of whom no recorded 
word remains to show what sort of a living being she was; 
but whose company made It possible for Stella to live In Ire- 
land without the annoyance of gossip. When Swift was ab- 
sent from Laracor, the two ladles usually occupied the vicar- 
age; on his return they retired to lodgings In the vicinity or 
in the little town of Trim, hard by. They were the Doctor's 
friends and housekeepers. He was very friendly to them, 
and kind enough to look after their little money matters. 
That was all; and no one seems to have thought of making 
any comment, save perhaps that Dr. Swift was unusually 
scrupulous in his care to avoid giving any occasion for scan- 
dal. Now these are all the facts In the case up to 17 10. Is 
there anything strange in them? Is there anything unac- 
countable In that this young lady should receive and appre- 
ciate the friendship of a man she had known from her ear- 
liest recollections, that she should value his careful and 
solicitous advice, and grow increasingly proud of his friend- 
ship as all England began to know and almost to fear him; 
and yet that she should never expect to marry him? It is 

* There is good evidence to the contrary. During his brief stay at 
Kilroot, Swift, for lack of better employment, fell in love v?ith a Miss 
Waring, sister of a college classmate. The lady declined his offer of 
marriage ; but years after, when Swift's prospects were brightening, she 
seems to have repented her decision, and sought to induce Swift to renew 
his advances. Swift ended the acquaintance by a very sardonic letter in 
which he assures her that he cannot understand why she has changed her 
mind but that he will stand by his offer if she insists. In this letter he says, 
on the word of a Christian and a gentleman, that he has "never thought 
of being married to any but yourself." 

When later, in 1704, a Dublin clergyman, one Tisdall, was minded to 
pay court to Stella he wrote to Swift. His letter is lost; but from the tone 
of Swift's answer it is evident that he regarded Swift rather as Stella's 
guardian than her lover. Swift in his reply says, "If my fortunes and 
humor served me to think of that state [i.e., of marriage] I should certainly 
. . . make your choice." The whole letter is such as it is inconceivable that 
on« rival should write to another. 



196 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

possible to make a sentimental romance out of the friend- 
ship of Jonathan Swift for Esther Johnson, but there is 
nothing in the facts of the case to warrant it; and to do so is 
to miss altogether the real beauty and tenderness of that 
friendship. 



VI 

The next ten years brought no further ecclesiastical 
preferment for Swift. A series of disappointments left him 
in 17 lo, as he was in 1701, Vicar of Laracor, with a con- 
gregation of rarely more than a dozen, — "most gentle and 
all simple," as he said, — and an income all told of about 
£250, upon which there were charges that ate up the greater 
part. To tell what he hoped to get, and had a right to hope 
to get, but lost, — that would be too long a story. The secre- 
taryship to the embassy at Vienna, prebends at Windsor, 
Westminster, Canterbury, the deanery of Derry, the bishop- 
ric of Waterford, — they had all been dangled before his 
eyes and given to men who would bid higher for them in 
money or in service. His circle of acquaintance was widen- 
ing. He was much in London, and by 1705 had met Addi- 
son, Steele, Philips, Congreve, Somers, Halifax, and almost 
all the great men of wit or politics. The Whig party seemed 
to have plenty of places and patronage for others, but noth- 
ing for him. 

Meantime, his fame was growing. In 1704, The Battle 
of the Books, which had been handed about in manuscript 
for six years or more, was published, and in the same volume 
was included The Tale of a Tub. The Tale of a Tub is the 
most masterly prose satire in the English language. Its 
central story, in the magnitude of interests involved and in 
the homely economy of satiric material used, has no parallel; 
while in the introductions and digressions the eager satire, 
breaking away from the bounds of ordered narrative, 
sweeps into its hurrying stream almost all the complacent 
shams of truth, the little omnium of self-satisfied critics, the 
shallowness of a skeptical philosophy, the parade of a worth- 



JONATHAN SWIFT 197 

less science. The satire is bitter, indignant, but entirely 
honest. One feels in those early satires the first bright in- 
vention of early life, the assurance, the audacity of youth. 
One can feel, moreover, as he reads, the eager impatience of 
this proud youth, his triumphant scorn of folly and pretense, 
all the more bitter because it can find no other outlet. Chaf- 
ing within the barriers that shut him out from the great 
struggle of life, this haughty young champion throws his 
glove defiantly over his prison wall full in .the face of the 
heedless world. Dr. Johnson — who got queer wrinkles in 
his brain sometimes — doubted whether it could have been 
written by Swift; "there is in it," says he, "such a vigor of 
mind, such a swarm of thoughts, so much of nature and art 
and life," Precisely: and if these things are not to be found 
in the prose of Jonathan Swift, where in this world are they 
to be found ? Like nearly all his works. The Tale of a Tub 
was published anonymously; but Swift was soon known to 
be the author. After that there could be no question as to 
his power. 

And it seems certain that this satire — though not pub- 
lished till later — was written before Swift was thirty years 
of age. I don't wonder at his pathetic exclamation, when in 
later years as his mind was breaking, he turned over the 
leaves of this book, "Good God! what a genius I had when 
I wrote that book!" 

As to the character of the man who would write such a 
book, there was then, and has been ever since, some differ- 
ence of opinion. Many people thought the book irreverent; 
and many more affected to think so. It is often said that 
had Swift never written it, he would have won the bishop's 
lawn before he died. It may be admitted that the Juvenalian 
temper is not that best becoming the sacred office; but it 
must be urged that Swift believed himself writing in the 
interest of the truth he professed and the Church to which 
he belonged. No one who understands his character will 
doubt his statement that he conceived The Tale of a Tub 
fitted to serve the cause of morality and religion. 

In point of fact, The Tale of a Tub probably had far 



198 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

less to do with Swift's failure to get advancement in the 
Church than his doubtful politics. He had thus far called 
himself a Whig. His first political pamphlet, a rather aca- 
demic analogy Of the Dissensions in Athens and Rome 
(1701), was a protest against the Tory attacks upon the 
Whig leaders, Somers and Halifax. His early education, 
the influence of Temple, the literary friendships of more re- 
cent years, all allied him with the Whig party. His own 
opinions on all matters pertaining to the State were in ac- 
cord with those of the Whigs. He heartily accepted the 
Revolution settlement. He had no sympathy with the high 
Tory notions of royal prerogative and unconditional obedi- 
ence which the logic of events had so completely refuted. 
But, on the other hand, he was growing more and more 
dissatisfied with the attitude of the Whigs toward the 
Church. It is always to be remembered as explaining 
Swift's conduct, that the interests of the Church as he con- 
ceived those interests, were to him, since the day he took 
orders, of supreme importance. The decay of religion in his 
day was matter of grave concern to all good men. And to 
Swift the only efficient religion was religion as by law es- 
tablished: the only remedy for the growing irreligion of the 
age was to strengthen the Establishment. But he saw that 
the Whigs were indifferent or hostile to the Establishment; 
they were over-indulgent to Dissenters. They opposed the 
Occasional Conformity Bill which would exclude Dissenters 
from civil affairs; they urged the abolition of the Tests in 
Ireland. Some of the prominent leaders, like Lord Whar- 
ton, were men of notoriously evil life. The Tory party, on 
the other hand, were distinctively the Church party. They 
professed unflinching zeal for its interests. Their rallying 
cry was "The Church is in danger." In these circumstances 
it Is not strange that Swift found himself steadily receding 
from the Whigs. His position is clearly stated in a series 
of pamphlets issued in 1708: On the Sacramental Test; A 
Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reforma- 
tion of Manners; Argument against Abolishing Christianity; 
and The Sentiments of a Church of England Man. In the 



JONATHAN SWIFT 199 

Sentiments of a Church of England Man he expressly avows 
that in matters of the State he is a Whig, but in matters of 
the Church a Tory, That is, he is already in the position of 
an Independent, midway between the two parties. He was 
soon to take the next step, and place himself squarely on the 
Tory side. 

VII 

To understand the next chapter in Swift's life we must 
recall briefly the condition of parties in the winter of 1710- 
1711. During all of Anne's reign the fortune of parties de- 
pended largely upon the ups and downs of the great War 
of the Spanish Succession which broke out in 1701, just be- 
fore Anne came to the throne. So far as England was con- 
cerned, it was a Whig war. King William welcomed it as a 
crowning opportunity to check the ambition of his life-long 
enemy, Louis XIV; and the Whig party supported the 
policy of their king. The Tories, on the other hand, from 
the first gave to the war only a reluctant and unwilling sup- 
port. They said, truly enough, that England should have 
nothing to do with a quarrel over the Spanish crown. They 
were in a majority when the war began, and would have kept 
England out of the struggle had not Louis himself made it 
inevitable by acknowledging the claims of the Pretender — 
son of the deposed James II — to the English throne. But 
a successful war is always popular, and strengthens that 
party which favors it most. In the general elections of 
1705* which followed the great victory of Blenheim, the 
Whigs returned very large majorities; by 1708 they were 
able to demand the exclusion of all Tory members from the 
cabinet. Ministry, Lords, and Commons were now under 
their control; it was the beginning of strictly party gov- 
ernment. 

Yet in spite of this success, the Whigs were nearing de- 
feat. For the war was beginning to be unpopular. After 
eight years of victories it seemed no nearer ending than 
when it began. In fact there was a growing suspicion that 



200 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

the Whigs did not wish it to end. For, by the device of the 
national debt, the burdens of the war seemed to fall almost 
exclusively on the landed class, to which most of the Tories 
belonged, while its rewards came almost exclusively to the 
moneyed class, to which most of the Whigs belonged. 
As soon as a town Whig could get a thousand pounds 
he invested it in the public securities upon which, of 
course, he paid no taxes, but from which he received 
a handsome interest out of the taxes paid by the land. 
Moreover, there was a growing doubt about the ques- 
tion of the succession which had been the original justi- 
fication for the war. Queen Anne had evidently not long to 
live, and her children were all dead before her. In the event 
of her death without heirs, it had been provided that the 
crown should go to a granddaughter of her great-grand- 
father, the Electress Sophia, ruler of a petty German state, 
whom nobody knew or cared for; or, if she should die be- 
fore Anne, — as she did, — then the crown was to go to her 
son, an even more insignificant person than his mother. It 
seemed a very long way to go for a King of England, and a 
very poor place to find one ; and many people who were by 
no means Jacobites thought that the Pretender must come 
to the throne at last, and began to doubt the wisdom of 
fighting so long to keep him out. It was also, as has been 
said, a common accusation against the Whigs that they were 
careless of religion and willing to secure the adherence of 
the Dissenters and all the non-religious elements in the State 
at the cost of any sacrifice of the interests of the Church. 
This feeling was greatly intensified by an unfortunate mis- 
take of the Whigs. A very declamatory London clergyman, 
Dr. Sacheverell, preached a sermon before the Lord Mayor, 
in November, 1709, on what he chose to call the perils to 
the Church from false brethren, in the course of which he 
took occasion to arraign Whig doctrines and Whig leaders 
in very intemperate language. His declamation would have 
done no harm; but in an evil hour the ministry resolved to 
impeach him. This enabled the foolish parson to pose as a 
martyr, and fanned the Tory zeal for the Church into a 



JONATHAN SWIFT 201 

flame at once. The ladies had Sacheverell's picture in their 
prayer books and on their fans : and when the Doctor went 
into the country after his trial his journey was a kind of tri- 
umph that set the church bells ringing half over England. 

All this augured ill for the Whigs. But their defeat was 
assured when the Queen changed her favorite. Queen Anne 
was a flaccid creature, who, as Swift said, "never had a 
stock of amity sufficient for more than one person at a 
time." Through her reign thus far she had been under the 
control of her intimate friend, the imperious Duchess of 
Marlborough. But it finally began to soak into Queen 
Anne's mind that she was being managed; and she didn't 
like it. She transferred her favor from the Duchess to a 
waiting woman of the Duchess, Abigail Hill, afterwards 
Mrs. Masham, who was a distant relative of the Tory 
leader, Robert Harley. And thus, through Abigail Hill, 
the Tories found means to call the attention of the Queen 
to the dissatisfied condition of the country, and to persuade 
her that she might now safely dismiss her Whig ministers, 
dissolve parliament, and try the chances of a general elec- 
tion. Their expectations were realized. During the late 
summer and early autumn of 17 10 the Queen dismissed her 
Whig ministers, one after another, and called to the head of 
affairs Robert Harley and young Henry St. John, — soon to 
be made Viscount Bolingbroke. Parliament was dissolved at 
the end of September and the elections which immediately 
followed brought up an overwhelming Tory majority. And 
to crown all, next year Anne created twelve new Tory peers 
at a stroke, thus swamping the Whig majority in the Lords. 
It was one of the most sweeping and dramatic changes in 
English political history. 

VIII 

Just at this stirring period Swift came over to England. 
He was charged with a commission from his archbishop to 
secure if possible for the Irish clergy that remission of the 
first fruits and tenths which had already been granted to the 



202 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

English Church. Once before he had been in London on the 
same errand. On that visit, which lasted during the whole 
of the year 1708, his repeated efforts had been unsuccessful; 
and his failure had strengthened his conviction that no fa- 
vors for the church could ever be obtained from the Whigs. 
He now reached London, September 7, 17 10, a fortnight 
before the dissolution of Parliament. Godolphin, the Whig 
Lord Treasurer, who had lost his place a month before, re- 
ceived him very coolly; but the most of his Whig friends 
met him with a profusion of welcome that showed plainly 
enough their fear of losing him. "Ravished to see me," says 
he, "and would lay hold on me as a twig while they are 
drowning." In the first week in October he lays his Irish 
church business before Harley, and is received with a con- 
sideration in marked contrast with the coldness of Godol- 
phin. A little later he dines with Mr. St. John. He stands 
"ten times better with the new people," he writes to Stella, 
than ever he did with the old; "forty times more caressed.'' 
With his old literary friends in the Whig camp, Addison, 
Steele, Philips, Halifax, he is still intimate; but he is mak- 
ing new ones on the other side. Bishop Atterbury, genial 
Doctor Arbuthnot, Mr. Pope, the new poet, — they are all 
glad to have the honor of his acquaintance. By the middle 
of November he has made up his mind. He will give his 
hearty support to the new ministry. 

"He ratted," says Macaulay. "Without a pretence of 
principle," says Lord Stanhope, "deserting his cause for no 
better reason than that he thought it in danger." Not at 
all. On the contrary, the party to which he now gave his al- 
legiance professed — and Swift believed sincerely professed — 
to represent those principles he held most firmly. It was 
popular anxiety for the interests of the Church, more than 
any other cause, that had brought them into power. Nor, 
on the other hand, was Swift in any way officially committed 
to the Whigs. His association had chiefly been with them 
hitherto, but he had already protested against their attitude 
toward the Church, and was well known to be dissatisfied 
with them. In fact, while some of Swift's political writing is 



JONATHAN SWIFT 203 

very bitter, he was never an extreme partisan. In the Senti- 
ments of a Church of England Man he protests against that 
slavish temper which enters into a party as into an order of 
friars, and throughout his writings he frequently repeats 
this protest. Like Harley, he would have preferred a gov- 
ernment made up from the liberal men of both parties and 
representing all the interests of the nation. But he soon saw, 
as Harley did, that ministerial action could be efficient only 
when backed by a compact party organization. At all 
events, it was now only the Tory party that could advance 
the measures he had most at heart; there was, then, no rea- 
son why he should not work with them. 

Doubtless personal motives had much to do with his 
action. He was not absolutely disinterested. Few patriots 
are. He cared little for titles or empty rank. These things 
were always the objects of his satire; and his life did not 
belie his satire. Still less did he care for money. No man 
ever had a cleaner pair of hands than Jonathan Swift. When 
Harley once sent him a small sum of money as a present and 
not at all as a bribe. Swift sent it back indignantly, and re- 
fused to enter Harley's doors again until the minister had 
apologized. But he did covet some place in which he might 
show what stuff there was in him. He was forty-three years 
old. Hitherto he had been banished to a lonesome corner of 
Ireland. Now, conscious of great ability, he was ambitious 
of some opportunity for its exercise, — assuredly the noblest 
kind of ambition. It was power he wanted. And he got it. 
For the next three years he was not only incomparably the 
ablest writer on the Tory side, but he was also the intimate 
friend and adviser of the Tory ministers. 

On November 2, 17 10, Swift assumed control of the 
Examiner, a weekly journal established a little while before 
to explain and defend Tory principles. Swift made the 
Examiner the organ of that moderate Tory policy which 
Harley approved. His object was to write down the Whigs, 
moderate the zeal of the extreme Tories, and to unite all 
liberal men in support of the Church and the landed inter- 
ests, and in opposition to the war. His papers, therefore, ex- 



204 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

cepting a few that attack the Whig leaders, — especially 
Wharton and Marlborough, — are conciliatory and persua- 
sive in tone. And they are admirably reasoned; with such 
simplicity of statement and such apparent candor that their 
very sophistry seems convincing. The Examiner is our first 
example of political journalism that rises to the level of 
permanent literature. 

In the autumn of 171 1 Swift attempted an even more 
difficult task. The Tory ministry had taken office pledged 
to end the war. But to end the war satisfactorily seemed al- 
most impossible. Any proposition looking toward peace pro- 
duced bitter clamor from the Whigs, To make peace now, 
they said, would be to surrender the fruits of ten glorious 
years of victory. It would be perfidy, also, to England's 
allies. Moreover, they urged, the failing health of the 
Queen made the danger from the Pretender more imminent ; 
and they spread the rumor — for which there was doubtless 
some foundation — that the ministry were willing to admit 
the claim of the Pretender in return for some concessions 
from France. In these difficulties, the ministers again had 
recourse to Swift. His famous pamphlet, The Conduct of 
the Allies, fairly convinced thousands of Englishmen that 
they had been fighting an expensive and bloody war to sat- 
isfy the ambition of the Emperor and to fill the pockets of 
the Dutch, and that they were now asked to prolong that 
war still further merely to glut the greed of that moneyed 
class who were fattening on the bankruptcy of the nation. 
Seldom has a political pamphlet had such immediate effect. 
The first edition was exhausted in three days, the second 
in five hours, and in two months over eleven thousand copies 
had been sold. Swift's array of fact and historical precedent 
was convincing to the student of politics, while the vigor and 
simplicity of his style and his wealth of homely illustration 
appealed to the crowd. It is hardly too much to say that this 
pamphlet stopped the war. A month after its issue the min- 
isters dared to dismiss Marlborough ; and, though the nego- 
tiations dragged on through another year, peace was now 
assured. 



JONATHAN SWIFT 205 

Language to Swift was simply the vehicle of thought. 
No English writing better combines the three virtues of 
clearness, simplicity, vigor. "Proper words in proper 
places,"^ is his curt definition of style. Admiration for style 
apart from the meaning beneath it he would have considered 
a mark of mere literary preciosity, — as it usually is. It is 
true indeed that the greatest masters of modern prose have 
at command felicities of arrangement and cadence and a sub- 
tle use of the suggestive power of words, by means of which 
they can convey their thought not only with all its flexures 
of meaning but with all its delicate nimbus of emotion. But 
Swift needed no such niceties, for there was no subtlety or 
delicacy in his nature. Literary elaboration always seemed 
to him to imply artifice or pedantry. He was by no means 
one of the mob of gentlemen who write with ease; but all 
his efforts were directed to secure absolute clearness of 
thought before he wrote at all. Feeble and ambiguous writ- 
ing comes, he knew, not so much from lack of skill as from 
faintness and indecision in thinking. As he says in comment 
upon his definition of style, "When a man's thoughts are 
clear, the properest words will generally offer themselves 
first, and his own judgment will direct him in what order to 
place them." His own word seems always that spontaneous 
one that leaps first to the lips; but it is always the "proper- 
est" word. He is never feeling about uncertainly for his 
phrase. His diction is homely to the last degree; he has no 
hesitation in walking over the rules of the rhetorician, and 
he occasionally slips in his grammar; but you are never at a 
loss for his precise meaning. And there is a surprising vigor 
in his style. Simplicity with some writers means little more 
than meagerness; their style is simple because they have but 
little to say. But there was an intense, forthright quality In 
the action of Swift's mind that rolls a volume of plain 
thought upon you with amazing ease and rapidity. Imagina- 
tion, too, is never long absent from his writing. In truth 
Swift's imagination, though it dwelt mostly among familiar 
things, was richer than that of any of his contemporaries. 
* Letter to a Young Clergyman, Works, Vol. VIII, p. 205. 



2o6 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

It does not merely furnish the material for his allegories; it 
sprinkles his page thickly with homely metaphor and ex- 
ample, and it is constantly giving unexpected poignancy to 
some familiar phrase. Yet when all is said, the highest 
praise of Swift's style is its absolute fidelity to Swift's per- 
sonality. Nobody has been able to impress himself more vig- 
orously upon his readers. His writing is all alike. He has 
no reserved literary manner. Books, pamphlets, letters, ser- 
mons, private journals, — they are all Jonathan Swift speak- 
ing right on. 

Swift's literary fame will rest upon two kinds of work 
in which he has never been surpassed, the political tract — 
either in periodical or in pamphlet form — and the allegori- 
cal satire. In that age of pamphlets, when the press prob- 
ably exerted more political influence than ever before or 
since, Swift's work is perhaps the only political writing that 
has much permanent literary value. And even of his work 
— as of all party writing — it may be said that the qualities 
that made it effective at the time tended to diminish its last- 
ing interest. Aiming at immediate results, Swift seldom lifts 
his subject out of the atmosphere of temporary party strife, 
as Burke did, into the region of general principles. Indeed 
it was more true of Swift's political work than of Burke's 
that (he) 

To party gave up what was meant for mankind. 

It has been further objected to some of Swift's political 
writing that it lacks lightness and vivacity. Mr. Lane- 
Poole^ thinks that "no modern leader-writer, however com- 
mon-place, would write such heavy stuff" as the Examiners 
now. Well, perhaps not. The modern editorial is written 
to be read while you are swallowing the morning coffee or 
balancing yourself on one leg in a crowded railway car. It 
must not mean much, as it must reduce the task of thinking 
to a minimum. Moreover, it is written as a pure matter of 
business, by men who may vote in the afternoon for the 

* Swift's Prose Writings, Preface, p. xxv. 



JONATHAN SWIFT 207 

candidate they have abused in the morning. But Swift was 
more earnest than that. He wrote to men who thought, and 
he was determined to convince them. His papers continue 
to interest simply because he put so much of himself into 
them. The homely sense, the inimitable irony, the energy 
of conviction, the triumphant vigor of statement, — these 
hold our attention though we have ceased to care for the 
question that called them into action. Swift was the prince 
of controversialists. He could be extremely rancorous when 
rancor would tell most; but he knew how also to give his 
most dogmatic statements an air of candor, and his argu- 
ment, even when sophistical, has a resistless plausibility. 
The soundness of his reasoning cannot be questioned. He 
lacked only the crowning gift of persuasiveness. He really 
had no notion of moving men save by convincing or com- 
pelling them. There is an arrogant tone in his argument 
always, and he makes his conclusions so clear that he has 
nothing but contempt for those who dare to question them. 
But for the reader of to-day, who does not care about the 
conclusion and has no partisan prejudices to be offended, 
this energetic self-assurance only deepens that impression 
of personality which is always the secret of Swift's power. 
But it was not by his pen only that Swift aided the min- 
istry. He himself took more satisfaction in his personal in- 
timacy with them and the value they placed upon his counsel. 
His pride may exaggerate this influence somewhat; but there 
can be little doubt that for two years no man outside the 
ministry had so much to do with the most important meas- 
ures of state. For once his pride of power had full swing. 
He Avas not the man to bear his honors meekly. "I am proud 
enough in the drawing-room to make all the lords come up 
to me," he says frankly to Stella in the Journal; "one passes 
half an hour pleasantly enough." T said the Duke of 
Buckingham must make the first advances to me, not I to 
him.' Doubtless there is a touch of cynical swagger in the 
demeanor of this Irish priest, and he asserts his supremacy 
with a little too much bravado. Yet there must have been 
a singular fascination in the personality of Swift. We think 



208 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

of him most often to-day as he was in his latest years, when 
disease and misanthropy had written themselves deeply into 
his face and out of his eyes looked the wild gloomy spirit of 
his approaching doom. But in those days when he was at 
his best, his face was singularly attractive, his eyes 
Pope described as "azure as the heavens," and his mobile 
features quivered with the intensity of his nature. Certain it 
is that many of the best men — and many of the best and 
brightest women — found a compelling charm in his compan- 
ionship. The best that society had to give was free to him. 
Years before Addison had characterized him as the most 
agreeable companion and the truest friend as well as the 
greatest genius of the age ; and the group of Tory men of wit 
and learning that now drew in about him, — Arbuthnot, Gay, 
Prior, Parnell, Pope, Oxford, Bolingbroke, Peterborough, 
Atterbury, — all looked up to him as the center of their 
brilliant circle. His keen satiric glance pierced through all 
the pretense and convention of society; but his temper, 
though occasionally bitter, was not yet soured, and a dash 
of satire gave pungency and sparkle to his conversation. 
For he was an admirable talker. He knew how to give 
some intellectual charm to the conversation of any company 
where he was; while his sarcastic essays On Polite Conver- 
sation show how he despised the feeble flow of commonplace 
and inanities that often passed for conversation in what 
called itself good society. He found time from the urgency 
of business to extend his own liberal studies and to aid other 
people in theirs; and he used his great influence with the 
ministry to secure a generous patronage of literature. The 
only pamphlet he ever published over his own name — A 
Proposal for Ascertaining the English Tongue — was a 
letter to Harley proposing a kind of academy to purify our 
language from its increasing corruptions and to fix its gram- 
mar and vocabulary. He was the moving spirit in that 
famous Brothers' Club which aimed to temper politics with 
letters, and in which, for the first time in our history, men 
of letters met on a perfect equality with men of state. And 
a little later, it was Swift who founded that still more; 



JONATHAN SWIFT 209 

famous Scriblerus Club out of which came, in time, The 
History of John Bull, The Dunciad, and Gulliver's Travels. 
But nothing Swift did or wrote in those years of his 
stay in London is of so much interest to posterity as that 
singular document which was not meant for posterity at all, 
the Journal to Stella. When he landed in England, Septem- 
ber 2, 1 7 10, Swift began at Chester a journal letter to 
Esther Johnson; he continued it till the 6th of June, 17 13, 
when he was at Chester again on his way back to Ireland. 
This is probably the most remarkable bit of autobiography 
in the language. It is of great importance as a record of 
political change during those eventful years, as a vivid 
picture of social conditions in London; but its chief interest 
consists in its revelation of the inmost heart of the writer. 
Swift's daily life in its routine, his plans and fears, his 
friendships and aversions, his pride at success and his anger 
at defeat, even his follies and weaknesses, his ailments of 
body and of temper, — they are all poured out absolutely 
without reserve or consciousness. Few men dare to be so 
frank even with themselves as this man is before the woman 
he has left at home in Ireland. But most amazing is his 
tenderness for her, the pathetic solicitude on every page. 
This is a side of Swift's nature that, were it not for the 
Journal, we could hardly have guessed. He frequently 
drops into that "little language" which is obviously the 
broken utterance of her childhood that he had never for- 
gotten. He writes always and everything. He snatches a 
few moments when he comes home weary at night from 
Mr. Harley's council-chamber or Mrs. Masham's levee; he 
writes abed in the morning, when that scoundrel Patrick, 
if for a wonder he isn't drunk, is laying the fire and the room 
is a-warming. He tells her how his affairs are going, how 
he has dined with Mr. St. John and met Mat. Prior, how 
Mr. Addison's paper gets on, or more imaginary adven- 
tures, — how he met the Queen yesterday, "and she made me 
a courtesy in a familiar way, 'How de do, How de do. How 
does M. D. in Ireland' and I considered she was only a 
queen and so excused her"; how he has lodgings in Bury 



210 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Street at eight shillings a week, plaguy dear — he tells her 
everything just as it comes into his head, and when the big 
sheet is full, he folds it over — "faith, 'tis a whole treatise" 
— and he seals it, and directs it, and then — he begins an- 
other. Nothing can be conceived more true and tender. 
There is an inexpressible kindness in it, all the more im- 
pressive in such a rudely imperious nature, a sort of leonine 
and shaggy gentleness. 

And it would seem that the Journal ought to be con- 
clusive as to the nature of the relation between Swift and 
Esther Johnson. One thing is certain : that relation must 
have been determined and perfectly understood on both 
sides before the Journal could have been written. And 
surely there can be no mistaking the temper in which it is 
written — intimate, playful, tender, solicitous, but perfectly 
passionless. This is not the love of a husband to his wife, 
or of a lover to his mistress. It is the wise, gentle, almost 
paternal affection of a guardian or an elder brother. It is 
Prospero to Miranda. There is not a word in the Journal 
that Stella could have mistaken for any other affection or 
construed into any promise or expectation of marriage. 

After more than a year of tedious negotiation the Treaty 
of Utrecht was finally signed, April, 17 13. Swift felt that 
it was now time for him to retire from the struggle of 
politics. He was the more ready to do so because he fore- 
saw the inevitable break-up of the Tory party. Its two 
leaders had never been fitted to work together, and were 
now growing more openly hostile to each other. Harley 
(who had been made Lord Oxford) was essentially a weak 
and hesitating man, who preferred a cautious and moderate 
policy principally because he never felt sure of his way. 
Bolingbroke, on the contrary, was bold to rashness, a bril- 
liant but not a safe leader, who found the indecision and 
slowness of his colleague intolerable. There were corre- 
sponding divisions in the party. The extreme Tories chafed 
at the hesitation of the ministry and clamored for sweeping 
partisan measures. The Moderates, or "Whimsicals" as 
they were called, were suspicious of Jacobite plans and 



JONATHAN SWIFT 2n 

inclined to an alliance with the Whigs. During the previous 
year, 1712, Swift had done his best to compose these 
differences. His two most important pamphlets of that 
year were addressed, one to the extreme Tories, A Letter 
to the October Club, in which he ingeniously defends the 
moderation of the ministry, and the other to the most mod- 
erate Tories, A Letter to a Whig Lord, in which he tries to 
show that even a moderate Whig, if he be loyal, is bound at 
that juncture to support the Queen and her ministry. But 
the effort had little success. The spirit of faction was 
increasing; the differences between the ministers were 
widening. Swift began to tire of it all. Yet to go back to 
Laracor without some ecclesiastical preferment in recog- 
nition of his services would hardly be consistent with self- 
respect. He could not allow himself to be called a tool that 
ministers had dropped when they could no longer use. As 
he wrote to Stella, "impertinent people would condole with 
me." He had never been willing to ask preferment for 
himself, often as he had done so for others. He would not 
now; but he gave Harley to understand that if anything 
were intended for him, it must be conferred at once. At 
the end of April he was appointed to the deanery of St. 
Patrick's, Dublin. The whole affair was little to his liking. 
It had been arranged only after vexatious difficulties and 
delays. Harley had been, as usual, vacillating and ineffi- 
cient. A vacancy had been made only by promoting the 
incumbent of St. Patrick's to a bishop's chair that Swift felt 
might have been more justly given to himself; but the 
Queen refused to consider him for a bishopric. He hoped 
that the ministry might keep him in England; St. Patrick's 
meant banishment for the rest of his life, from his most 
intimate friends to a country he hated. But Swift swallowed 
his disappointment, — that had now become his habit, — and 
went over to be installed. 

He had hardly reached Dublin, however, before he was 
recalled to reconcile if possible the jarring ministers. "We 
want you extremely," wrote Harley's secretary, Erasmus 
Lewis. Swift delayed a little, but at the first of September 



212 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

he returned, to spend one more winter In London. During 
this winter he was involved in a controversy with his old 
friend, Steele. Just before he went over to Dublin he had 
been greatly provoked by an unjust and blundering allusion 
to himself in Steele's Guardian; and now, when Steele at- 
tacked the ministry for not carrying out the terms of the 
peace, Swift replied in two pamphlets in which Steele is 
punished unmercifully. These pamphlets. The Importance 
of the "Guardian" and The Public Spirit of the Whigs, are 
examples, the one of Swift's most scathing sarcasm, the 
other of his fiercest scorn. But in the more important 
matter of bringing the ministers together and healing the 
divisions in the party, he could do nothing. He could not 
help seeing that Oxford, to whom he had always been the 
more attached, baffled by the difficulties of his position, was 
sinking into utter helplessness. Bolingbroke was getting 
the government into his own hands, and making ready to 
turn it over to the Pretender as soon as the Queen should 
die. Of these Jacobite schemes, however, it is certain that 
Swift had no knowledge. Indeed the suspicion that there 
were some matters on which the ministry did not now take 
him into their confidence, was one cause of his vexation. 
In the spring of 17 14 he wrote an admirable tract, Free 
Thoughts on the Present State of Affairs, in which he once 
more urged a temperate and comprehensive policy; but 
Bolingbroke, to whom the manuscript was submitted, made 
such changes in it that Swift refused to print it. In May, 
wearied out and hopeless, he withdrew into the country for 
a little rest with an old school-fellow at Letcombe. While 
he was there the crisis came. Oxford was dismissed five 
days before the death of the Queen, and Bolingbroke for 
the moment supposed himself secure in his plans. But he 
was outplayed by the Whigs in the very last move of his 
game. Anne was induced to place the Lord Treasurer's 
staff in the hands of the Earl of Shrewsbury on Thursday 
afternoon; on Sunday morning, August i, she died, and 
King George I was proclaimed. "What a world is this, and 
how does Fortune banter us!" wrote Bolingbroke to Swift 



JONATHAN SWIFT 213 

on Monday. Within a month Harley was in the Tower, 
and Bolingbroke in exile; the Tory party was dissolved. 
Swift hurried up to London to see all his old friends once 
more at the Scriblerus Club, and then he went over to 
Dublin. Only twice in the thirty years of life that remained 
to him was he ever in England again. The most brilliant 
chapter in his life was closed. 

IX 

As far as literary or political effort is concerned, the 
next six years of the life of Swift are a blank. He had no 
heart for further public work. His party was ruined. He 
was cut off from the companionship of all congenial friends, 
and set among strangers who were indifferent or hostile. 
At his appointment to St. Patrick's, the Archbishop of 
Dublin had written him a very chilly letter hinting that 
perhaps the best thing Swift could do in his office was to 
put a spire on the cathedral, "an ornament," said the Arch- 
bishop, "much admired in these parts." Even the mob was 
against him; on the morning of his installation he had found 
tacked upon the door of his cathedral some doggerel verses : 

Look down, St. Patrick, look, we pray. 
On this thy church and steeple ; 

Convert the dean on this great day. 
Or else — God help the people! 

Under the pressure of the last three years his health 
had been breaking, and the fits of deafness and giddiness 
he had suffered from childhood grew more frequent and 
severe. From this time his moody and misanthropic temper 
gained upon him. 

And besides all this, there was one sore anxiety which 
he could not reveal even to his nearest friends. Among the 
many doors opened to Swift during his London life was that 
of a Mrs. Vanhomrigh, a widow with two daughters. 
Her house in Bury Street was near Swift's lodgings; he 
often dined there, and found easy comfort and good com- 



214 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

pany, without the pretension and stiff conventionalities that 
he hated. When he took lodgings out at Chelsea for his 
health, he used to leave his gown and wig there over night 
and call for them when he came in of a morning. Whether 
thrifty Mrs. Van had any designs in making her house so 
convenient for the great Dr. Swift, I'm sure I don't know, 
but he was certainly often there, and the family soon became 
his intimate friends. The elder of the two daughters. Miss 
Hester Vanhomrigh, was nineteen years of age when 
Swift first met her. She was not a beauty; but she had what 
Swift always liked better than beauty, quick wit and a 
curious mind. Swift gave her advice about her reading, 
and for a time seems to have been a kind of teacher for her. 
The ignorance and frivolity of young ladies in his day was 
a frequent matter of sarcastic comment with him, and when- 
ever he saw quick parts and love of study in any lady of his 
acquaintance he was always ready to encourage them. The 
story of Swift's further acquaintance with Hester Van- 
homrigh has been greatly elaborated by the romantic imagi- 
nation of the biographers; but all we really know of it is 
drawn from some letters that Miss Vanhomrigh wrote 
and some verses that Swift wrote. ^ When, in 17 13, the 
acquaintance took a new, and to Swift a most surprising 
turn, he wrote an account of it in poetic form, under the 
title, Cadenus and Vanessa, — that is, Decanus, or the Dean, 
and Essa Van. These verses he sent Miss Vanhomrigh, 
evidently as a kind of explanation meant for her only. He 
hoped she would see the embarrassment in which she had 
placed him, and would so change her conduct as to relieve 
him from it.^ We learn from Swift's verses that his pupil 
one day astounded him by a declaration of love ; and that he, 
in surprise and mortification, was utterly at a loss what to 

* Our sources of information are now somewhat enlarged by the recently 
published Vanessa and her Correspondance ivith Jonathan Stmft, ed., with 
an Introduction, by A. Martin Freeman (Boston, Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1921). 
[L. B G.] 

*The Cadenus and Vanessa was revised in 1719, and it is this revised 
version that has come down to us. The later form contains some passages 
that can apply only to a later stage of the acquaintance. 



JONATHAN SWIFT 215 

do or say. From this time, for about ten years, poor Miss 
Vanhomrigh's hopeless passion was the burden of his life, 
half vexation, half grief. He could not return it; he could 
not shake it off. When he came over to Dublin in 17 14 she 
followed him with letters. Her mother was now dead, and 
she besought his advice and assistance. He tried to write 
her merely as a friend; she made it impossible. He tried 
not to write her at all; she sent him letters of passionate 
entreaty for a word. She came over to Ireland, and, in spite 
of his expostulations resided for a time in Dublin. He tried 
— rather foolishly — to marry her to somebody else. He 
tried to enlist her interest in matters of business or of letters. 
But nothing could avail. After a short residence in Dublin, 
she retired with her sister to a small estate at Celbridge. 
She was sinking under pulmonary disease, aggravated 
perhaps by her hopeless passion, and in 1723 she died. One 
can feel nothing but pity for either of the characters in this 
pathetic story. Surely Swift can be charged with nothing 
worse than pardonable blindness. A bachelor of forty-five 
deeply immersed in the affairs of Europe could hardly be 
expected to detect the first symptoms of such a fatal attach- 
ment; and there is not a particle of evidence to show that 
he selfishly dallied with that affection, or did anything to 
encourage it after it had once been disclosed to him. It is 
easy to say that he should have broken the acquaintance off 
at once and forever; but Vanessa's repeated requests for his 
assistance as well as his affection clearly made it difficult to 
do so without seeming cruelty. His conduct may have been 
unwise; but it was kindly meant. 

Vanessa's passion must almost certainly have been 
known to Stella; ^ but what were her feelings in the matter 
we have no means of telling, though it may not be difficult 
to conjecture. It has usually been believed that her jealousy 
was so far excited that, in 17 16, she insisted on a marriage 
with the dean. Nearly all the early biographers accept this 
story of Swift's marriage with Stella, though it is admitted 

^ Swift speaks of Mrs. Vanhomrigh and her family no less than sevent\- 
nine times in the Journal. 



2i6 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

that they never saw each other save In the presence of a 
third person, the marriage was never publicly owned, and 
was unknown to most of Swift's nearest friends. It is 
highly improbable that any such marriage ever took place. 
The evidence cannot be recited here. Suffice it to say that 
the meager, conflicting, and second-hand testimony usually 
cited cannot be accepted as proof of a marriage so purpose- 
less, so utterly inconsistent with the spirit of that long 
friendship, so contrary to the awful sincerity of the dean 
himself. Surely if Swift was married to Esther Johnson in 
17 1 6 his conduct in concealing it from Hester Vanhomrigh 
was something more than imprudent. 

But if it is admitted that Swift's cynical misanthropy 
grew upon him in these years, it should also be remembered 
that during all his Dublin residence he performed the duties 
of his clerical office with punctilious fidelity. Nay, he did 
much more than that. His personal charities were careful 
and abundant. A third of his income he always set aside 
for benevolence. "He gave away five pounds," said Delany, 
"easier than most men give five shillings, and I never saw 
poor so carefully and conscientiously attended to as those of 
his parish always were." But he was always careful that 
his charity should not foster idleness or beggary. He knew 
that if any people needed to be taught the lesson of thrift 
and small economy it was that shiftless Irish people. 

One gets glimpses, now and then, in these later years, of 
his relations with his poor people, of his grim humor, with 
solid wisdom and sometimes a gleam of tenderness under- 
neath it. He called on a poor farmer one day, who received 
him in his Sunday best, his wife in silk and ribbons and his 
gawky boy in a brand new lace cap. "Ah, Mr. Reilly," said 
the dean, "I'd like to go out and ride over your estate." 
"Estate, is it?" said the puzzled farmer. "Deil a foot o' land 
belongs to me or any of my generation." — "Ah, so, we'll 
stay in then; but when am I to see Mrs. Reilly?" "Mrs. 
Reilly, please your reverence, don't you see her there before 
ye?" "That, Mrs. Reilly, impossible! I've heard Mrs. 
Reilly was a very prudent woman, and I'm sure she'd never 



JONATHAN SWIFT 217 

dress herself out in silk and ornaments fit only for ladies of 
fashion." When the good lady, taking this rather broad 
hint, came in a few moments later, Swift met her with "Ah, 
ah, indeed, Mrs. Reilly, I'm heartily glad to see you; this 
husband of yours tried to palm off a fine lady on me for you, 
but I wasn't to be taken in so." He had grabbed the young- 
ster's cap off and torn it to bits; but on going away he gave 
him back the rags in a five-pound note. 

He used to have some wretched old woman in almost 
every dirty lane to whom he was accustomed to carry fre- 
quent aid in person, but he always insisted that they should 
have some employment; one of them knitted the dean's 
stockings, and another mended them. Vexed by the in- 
creasing pauperism about him, he invented a plan by which 
the deserving poor of his parish could be designated for 
assistance and the sturdy beggars set at work. The first 
five hundred pounds he saved he set apart as a loan fund to 
aid poor Irish tradesmen in their efforts to struggle into 
business. He helped more than two hundred families from 
this fund. It is no wonder that little by little the Irish people 
began to find him the truest of friends, even before his fa- 
mous writings in their behalf. One likes to remember his 
generosity, his kindness, his faithfulness in duty, during 
those closing years; one likes to remember the tribute of 
loyal reverence and admiration paid him by a host of humble 
people when his great friends were dropping away. 

In his own household he was a strict but just master, 
and his servants soon found him a generous one too. He 
gathered them for daily prayers as regularly as if it were a 
cathedral service; but so quietly that visitors were in his 
house for weeks without knowing it. He insisted on obe- 
dience, but almost always tempered the severity of his com- 
mands with a cynical humor under which they soon learned 
to see not only good sense but good nature; and he seldom 
objected to a bit of Irish impudence if it was seasoned with 
wit. 

While on a journey once with two servants, the butler on 
being bidden to clean his master's boots in the morning 



2i8 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

growled that they'd be dirty again soon enough if he did 
clean them. "Ah, sir," said Swift, "have you had your 
breakfast yet?" "No, that I haven't at all." "Well, I 
have," said Swift, "and it makes no difference with you, 
you'll be hungry again soon enough, if you do eat; so we'll 
start on," — and off they went. A mile on the road, a 
stranger met them with the inquiry where they were going. 
"Begorra," said the hungry butler, "we're goin' to heaven, 
for the dean he's a-praying and I'm a-fasting." Swift gave 
the man a half crown for his wit, and they stopped at the 
next inn for breakfast. Such stories, a multitude of which 
have gathered about the private life of the dean, are cer- 
tainly trifles; but they show that underneath his rough 
exterior and crabbed eccentricities of manner, there was a 
man's heart, just and not unkindly, and that plain people 
who had no humbug about them could find it easily enough. 



When Swift, in 172 1, took up the pen that had lain 
seven years idle, it was in the cause of Ireland. The 
wretchedness of Ireland in the first half of the last century 
as it stands recorded on the temperate pages of modern 
historians seems incredible.^ Conquered again and again, 
the island had at last been subdued. The Irish had no other 
notion of protest than armed resistance; and armed resist- 
ance was now hopeless. After the revolt of 1689 had been 
put down, the country was placed under that Penal Code 
which, whether it was a crime or a blunder, must be remem- 
bered as the disgrace of English legislation. But atrocious 
as were these laws against the Roman Catholics, they had 
less to do with the misery of Ireland than England's com- 
mercial tyranny. England was not very wise or generous in 
the treatment of any of her dependencies in the eighteenth 
century; and she regarded none with such contempt and 
jealousy. As one form after another of Irish industry had 
risen into prominence, between 1660 and 1700, with cruel 
* See, for example, Lecky's England in the Eighteenth Century, Ch. VII. 



JONATHAN SWIFT 219 

ingenuity it was crushed by commercial legislation of un- 
exampled severity. Ireland was the green pasture land of 
Europe ; England now forbade the export of her cattle ^ 
and ruined her graziers at a stroke. They turned their 
pastures into sheep-walks and began to manufacture the 
wool. This industry promised in twenty years to make 
Ireland wealthy; England forbade all exports of Irish 
woolens,^ crushed the growing industry, and drove a large 
population into utter poverty. By other acts Ireland was 
forbidden to export anything to the colonies or import any- 
thing from them, unless by way of England. All commerce 
and all industry were blasted. The mass of the Irish people, 
too improvident by nature, were brought to the verge of 
beggary. And what was even worse, the whole people were 
sunk in apathy. The national spirit seemed broken. Self- 
government they had none. There was, to be sure, an Irish 
parliament; but it had no independence, and could pass only 
such acts as had first been approved in England. Almost 
every office in the Irish government, from the Viceroy 
down, was filled by Englishmen sent over from London, 
who were greedy for the meager spoil of a wasted country. 
Most of them never resided in Ireland, and there were many 
who landed at Ringsend on Saturday night, qualified for 
office by taking the sacrament on Sunday, took the oaths 
Monday, and sailed back to England Tuesday to draw their 
salaries without seeing Ireland again for the year. In the 
established Church, things were not much better. With the 
hatred of Roman Catholics on the one side and the jealousy 
of Presbyterians on the other, it would have had a hard 
struggle if wisely governed; but It was not wisely governed. 
Its bishops usually aimed to smother any national feeling 
and make Ireland and the Irish church the servile depen- 
dents of England — and to provide handsomely for their 
own greed. Said Swift bitterly, "Excellent moral men have 
been selected . . . [in England to govern the church]. 
But it unfortunately has uniformly happened that as these 

*By the Acts of 1665 and i68o. 
*By the Act of 1699. 



220 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

worthy divines crossed Hounslow Heath on their road to 
Ireland to take possession of their bishoprics they have been 
regularly robbed and murdered by the highwaymen fre- 
quenting that common, who seize upon their robes and 
patents, come over to Ireland, and are consecrated bishops 
in their stead." Unusual misrule and corruption, bare- 
legged beggary, and a carnival of vulgar crime, — that was 
the state of Ireland. 

Swift looked on in silence for seven years. The spec- 
tacle of Irish degradation filled him with mingled contempt 
and indignation. He knew that the ills of Ireland were 
largely due to English misgovernment ; and it seemed to him 
that those ills were rapidly growing intolerable under the 
venal administration of Walpole. At last when in 1720 
some measures of the Whigs showed anew their determina- 
tion to keep both the Irish church and the Irish people in 
slavish dependence upon England, Swift could contain his 
anger no longer. In a pamphlet, A Proposal for the Uni- 
versal Use of Irish Manufacture, he exhorts the Irish 
people to refuse all English imports. Burn everything that 
comes from England, he says — except the coals and the 
people. Live on your own resources. In this first pamphlet 
of the Irish controversy Swift's style is, if possible, more 
terse and vigorous than ever, his irony more keen, and there 
is a note of indignant pity not previously heard in his 
writing. But his great opportunity came three years later. 

In 1722 the English government granted to one William 
Wood a patent for the coinage of copper for Ireland. 
There was undoubtedly a need of small coin in Ireland; but 
the amount named in the patent, £108,000, was vastly in 
excess of the need. The patent had been obtained only by 
the most notorious jobbery. Wood paid £10,000 in one 
bribe into the capacious lap of the Duchess of Kendal, — the 
frowsy mistress of George I, — and this was only one of a 
series of blackmail payments which various officials had to 
levy on the transaction. And what to Swift was worst of 
all, the whole affair had been managed in England, in utter 
indifference to the wishes of the Irish people, and without 



JONATHAN SWIFT 221 

so much as consulting the Irish Viceroy, Privy Council, or 
Parliament. But when, next year. Wood attempted to in- 
troduce his copper, he met with unexpected opposition. 
The Irish Parliament, for a wonder, found spirit to protest, 
and the popular indignation slowly grew to such a pitch 
that, in the summer of 1724, the English government was 
forced to appoint a committee of inquiry upon the coinage. 
It was now that Swift saw his opportunity. It was gen- 
erally believed — and with good reason — that Wood's coins 
were below their professed value. Swift seized upon this 
belief as the readiest instrument of agitation. His real 
object was to arouse the indignation of the Irish people 
against an imposition upon their rights; but he knew this 
could not be done by a discussion of constitutional 
grievances. Tell your neighbor a thief is at his pocket-book 
if you wish him to stir. Swift addressed directly to the 
people a letter, printed in the cheapest manner, couched in 
the homely phrases of a tradesman, and signed M. B. 
Drapier. In this letter, by all those arts of which he was so 
consummate a master, he urges the tradespeople and labor- 
ers to refuse Wood's copper. Assuming it to be a fact that 
the coin is under value, he gravely drives that fact into all 
sorts of humorous exaggerations and inference. Shrewd 
wit, biting irony, telling illustration, bits of sound economic 
doctrine are all conveyed in a style so simple that thousands 
who couldn't read a word of it could understand every word 
when it was read to them. When the report of the Com- 
mittee was published weakly defending the patent, the 
Drapier issued in quick succession two more letters heaping 
infinite ridicule upon the pretended vindication of Wood, 
and calling upon the gentry to unite with the people in 
indignant protest against this attempt to enslave a free 
nation in order to enrich a scheming English ironmonger. 
Two months later when popular feeling was at its height. 
Swift sought to turn it to lasting account by his noble Fourth 
Letter, To the Whole People of Ireland. Here he leaves all 
little grievances aside. The great wrong in this coinage is 
that it was forced upon Ireland without the knowledge or 



222 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

consent of her government. Passing from the matter of 
the coin altogether, he strikes boldly against the English 
doctrine of the dependence of Ireland. Ireland is a free 
nation, of coordinate rights with England under the British 
crown. As such she deserves and must have the same 
rights of self-government as England enjoys, for (and here 
his phrase strangely resembles that of the American col- 
onists half a century later) "government without the consent 
of the governed is the very definition of slavery." 

A storm of agitation followed. The government chose 
to consider the pamphlet seditious, and offered a reward of 
£300 for information of the author. Everybody knew per- 
fectly well who the author was; but no one dreamed of 
informing. The printer was arrested; but the grand jury 
persistently refused to find a bill against him. Every tavern 
had its Drapier's sign. Wood was derided in street ballads, 
and burned in effigy every night. The English government 
were powerless in the face of this new kind of Irish oppo- 
sition, which took the form not of midnight murder and 
petty rebellion, but of constitutional agitation. Wood's 
patent was withdrawn. It is not easy to overestimate the 
influence of this victory. It marks an era in Irish politics. 
From that time, as Mr. Lecky says, "rebellion has been an 
anachronism and a mistake. The age of Grattan and 
O'Connell had begun." 

XI 

During the months of the Drapier agitation Swift was 
contemplating a visit to his old friends in London. He had 
kept up his correspondence with several of them, — there is 
no more delightful bundle of letters in the language than 
those that passed between these friends in the years 17 14 to 
1726, — and of late they had been especially urgent to see 
his face once more. Swift hesitated. He dreaded a meet- 
ing that must have seemed to those men like a satire on 
human ambition; he dreaded still more, as he wrote a friend, 
the inevitable return "to this enslaved country where I am 



JONATHAN SWIFT 223 

condemned to pass my existence." But he went at last. In 
1726 the old Scriblerus Club met again, "like mariners 
after a storm" as Arbuthnot said, and talked over the 
literary plans they had amused themselves with twelve years 
before. The circle had been broken by the deaths of Harley 
and of Prior; Atterbury was in exile; but the others were 
there, Bolingbroke, Pope, Arbuthnot, Gay, Peterborough, 
Bathurst. In the days of Queen Anne they had projected a 
kind of philosophic satire, to be done between them, and 
published as the Memoirs of the Club. The plan had been 
abandoned; but it probably furnished the original motive 
for two great satires. In 1726, Pope was already at work 
upon The Diinciad; and Swift brought with him to London 
the manuscript of Gulliver's Travels. Some sketch of it had 
probably been formed before he left London in 17 14; at 
all events he had certainly been writing upon it, at odd 
hours, for five or six years. Gulliver was read over the 
tables of the Club with varying comment and revision, dur- 
ing the weeks of the summer, and in November it was 
published. 

Gulliver is the most familiar of all Swift's works; it 
probably deserves also to be called the greatest. Nothing 
better shows the play of his humor, his marvelous fertility 
of invention, the range and intensity of his satire. Swift is 
said to have been apprehensive that the Gulliver might 
betray some weakening of his powers; but his intellect and 
imagination seem to have worked on with unabated vigor, 
perhaps with morbid energy, until after 1730. Strange 
that this most terrible of satires should now sometimes be 
thought of as a children's book of wonder stories. The 
narrative is managed with such ingenious simplicity, the 
incidents and imagery, though striking, are so vivid and so 
consistent, that at least the first two books have been read by 
thousands of ingenuous youth without a suspicion of their 
satiric import. But it is to be hoped the time may never 
come when the underlying spirit of the Gulliver will be in- 
telligible to any child. In the first two books, indeed, the 
temper is not altogether unhealthy; the satire is not yet 



224 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

savage or bestial. They were probably written during the 
earlier years of Swift's Dublin residence, and the satire is 
directed against that political selfishness and ambition which 
in recent years had so often excited his indignation and 
contempt. But in the later books the object and the temper 
of the satire change. Swift's long exile, his sense of dis- 
appointment and failure in life, his dread of the physical 
disease that was steadily undermining his strength and 
threatened to drive him mad at last, above all his constant 
enforced contact with the misery and squalor of Irish life, — 
all these things are written darkly into the last two books of 
Gulliver. As the satire draws toward its awful close, its 
themes are no longer the folly of ambition, the littleness of 
power, not even the hoUowness of philosophy and all that 
calls Itself wisdom, but rather the burdens of our life, the 
inevitable ills of the flesh, the slow decay of age, and at last 
it Includes in its sweep all the affections that can soften, as 
well as all the vices that can degrade, our common human- 
ity. The Yahoos are a study of mankind quite dehumanized 
and Imbruted; the Houyhnhnms are a race of rational ani- 
mals whose stoical superiority Is purchased at the cost of all 
natural emotions. There Is no other satire so cruel and 
hopeless. And Its effect Is Increased by Swift's Impassive 
manner. There Is nothing feverish and nothing exag- 
gerated in his story. We feel that underneath the surface 
there burns a fierce, despairing Indignation; but the cool 
and plausible narrative gives no sign. 

Swift is undeniably our greatest satirist. His satire is 
never of the lighter sort that exposes to good-humored 
laughter our vanity and follies; severe and saturnine, It at- 
tacks only what seemed to Swift some essential falsehood. 
His motive Is always the same, — he will tear away pretense 
and convention and expose the truth. We may grant that 
the limitations of Swift's nature made his definition of truth 
very narrow. Utterly devoid of sentiment, with no concep- 
tion of the ideal element in life and no sympathy with aspira- 
tion after any ends not measured by reason and the senses, 
he was forced to interpret truth in the lowest terms of 



JONATHAN SWIFT 225 

reality. He could not see that much of the convention of 
society and of religion, so far from disguising hypocrisy, is 
an honest endeavor to express not our attainments but our 
ideals. Religious enthusiasm was to him always a symptom 
of imposture. Truth is best seen, he thought, in the cool 
light of the reason, and violent zeal for it, "has a hundred 
to one odds to be either petulancy, ambition or pride." ^ 
But these very limitations of sympathy which made Swift's 
satire often unjust add to its awful sincerity and vigor. 
There is no department of our nature in which his merciless 
eye will not detect some smallness or falsehood. 

The method of Swift's satire is always to parody the 
seeming great in the little. Folly and vice often escape 
our notice when our vision is filled with the splendid figures 
of power or the long spectacle of history; but we see them 
when the same actions are parodied on the satirist's vulgar 
stage. And the wider the contrast in circumstance between 
the imposing falsehood and the homely verity, the more 
striking the satiric effect. This is the reason for the su- 
premacy of Swift's two great satires. He has not wasted 
himself upon personal resentments, nor immortalized fools, 
as Pope has done by embalming them in the amber of his 
verse. He has chosen rather as the object of one of his 
satires the corruptions and divisions of the greatest organi- 
zation on earth; and he has shown them to us in the home- 
liest possible story. In Gulliver the theme of his satire is 
wider still; nothing less than the pride, folly, and weakness 
of our race. And the narrative that conveys it is an old 
sailor's yarn. 

There is a kind of droll literality about Swift's humor- 
ous imagination. He usually prefers not to give us new or 
strange images but rather to exhibit unexpected force in 
old ones. Thus he is fond of bringing out the vividness 
In any familiar figure by gravely taking It in its literal mean- 
ing as if he saw no other. This is well illustrated in that 
admirable early bit of foolery in which Swift, writing over 
the signature of Isaac Bickerstaff, had predicted that the 

* Thoughts on Religion, Works, VIII, 53. 



226 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

notorious quack and almanac maker, Partridge, would in- 
fallibly die of a fever on the twenty-ninth of March next, 
at eleven o'clock at night. On the thirtieth of March 
Bickerstaff issued another pamphlet gravely recounting the 
death of Partridge at the time predicted; and when next 
day the poor charlatan rushed into print frantically as- 
serting that he was alive still, Bickerstaff proceeded to 
assure him that he must be mistaken and dead, and to prove 
it by a series of incontestable arguments, the best of which 
was that above a thousand gentlemen having bought Part- 
ridge's almanac this year, "at every line they read they 
would lift up their eyes and cry out betwixt rage and 
laughter, 'they were sure no man alive ever writ such 
damned stuff as this.' Neither did I ever hear that opinion 
disputed; so that Mr. Partridge lies under a dilemma, either 
of disowning his almanac, or allowing himself to be no man 
alive." 

When Wood threatened that if the Irish people refused 
his coin he should force it down their throats by law, Swift 
set Dublin laughing by computing in all seriousness that 
it was doubtful whether there were throats enough in Ire- 
land to swallow so much base metal. In fact, most of his 
narrative satire is only such a detailed satiric Interpretation 
of some perfectly familiar metaphor. This Is evidently 
true of the Battle of the Books; the Modest Proposal Is a 
proposition, carried out in all Its grim circumstance, that the 
English landlords should do literally, what they were actu- 
ally doing In metaphor, — eat up the Irish poor; while Lilli- 
put and Brobdingnag are simply a visible exhibition of 
human littleness. And Swift has astonishing power to 
realize the details of such a conception so as to enforce a be- 
lief in his narrative. It is said there were readers who 
searched the atlas to determine the location of Laputa, and 
one person stoutly averred Lemuel Gulliver to be his neigh- 
bor. Nor is this power a common one. Johnson, who 
rather begrudged any praise to Swift, could hardly have 
made a more inapt remark of Gulliver than that "when we 
have once thought of big men and little men it Is easy enough 



JONATHAN SWIFT 227 

to do the rest." In fact, few things are more difficult to 
do. The imagination must invent an infinitude of plausible 
circumstances, all in strict consistence with each other and 
with the central supposition. For instance, the accuracy 
with which the scale of size is maintained in Lilliput has 
attracted the notice of one of the most acute of mathematical 
logicians.^ But this is not all. Defoe, whose Robinson 
Crusoe probably gave Swift some hints for Gulliver, equals 
Swift in this power to invent credibilizing details; but 
Defoe constantly clogs his story with tedious matters that 
serve no other purpose than to increase its verisimilitude. 
The incidents in Swift's story, on the contrary, are always 
interesting in themselves and always advance the move- 
ment of his narrative. And withal Swift never forgets his 
allegorical purpose : every incident is in harmony with his 
mood, and all the more important ones have specific satiric 
import. It is this union of the most sweeping and scathing 
satire with the most homely, straight-forward, unimpas- 
sioned narrative that gives to Swift's work its unique quality, 
and causes the masterpiece of the greatest English cynic 
to be sometimes thought of as a nursery tale. 

The temper of Gulliver Swift would not have tried to 
defend. The very foundation of his book, he said to Pope, 
was misanthropy. This, he felt more and more, was the 
disease of his soul. His only excuse was he could not help 
it. Do what he would, the black picture of humanity was 
constantly before his eyes. "Do not the corruptions and 
villainies of men in power eat your flesh and exhaust your 
spirits?" he once said to Delany. "Why, no, sir." "No, 
sir!" exclaimed Swift in a fury. "Why how can you help 
it, how can you avoid it?" Gulliver is the record of this 
black misanthropy which, beginning to make itself felt in 
any serious form only after his exile to Dublin, grew steadily 
upon him till it deprived him of his sovereignty of reason at 
the last. 

Swift had been in London four months when news 
came of the illness of Stella that hurried him back to Ireland 

^ De Morgan. 



228 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

in an agony of apprehension. Stella, however, rallied for a 
time, and he returned to London in April of 1727 to com- 
plete during the summer business that he had begun there. 
But he had little heart to enjoy the companionship of his old 
friends as he had done the year previous. His own malady 
tortured him as never before. His deafness had increased 
so that conversation was very difficult. His memory at 
times seemed to be slipping away. And worst of all was 
the constant apprehension of bad news from the one friend 

On whom my fears and hopes depend, 
Absent from whom all climes are curst, 
With whom I'm happy in the worst.^ 

In September the fatal tidings came. Stella was steadily 
sinking. "My God!" he writes, "I can't come. I can't see 
it! Write me only the facts; don't write me circumstances, 
I can't bear them. What am I to do in this world? I can 
hold up my sorry head no longer." In September he went 
back. It is said he could not bear the formalities of leave- 
taking with the friends whom he knew he should never see 
again, but stole away from Pope's house without saying any 
farewells. It was three months after he reached Dublin 
that the blow fell. Stella died on January 28, 1728. At 
eleven o'clock that night Swift began, and two nights later, 
too ill to rise from his bed but removed into another 
chamber where he might not catch through his windows 
the gleam of the funeral torches that lighted her to burial 
in the cathedral opposite, he continued that Character 
of Airs. Johnson, which in its struggle to be calm, to 
tell the truth as in the presence of the dead, is one of the 
most pathetic things in the language. There is no word of 
hysterical sorrow in it, but a grief too deep for tears. 

XII 

The rest of Swift's life is soon told. With Gulliver 
his literary work was practically finished. He wrote a few 

* From some verses written in a private journal by Swift while waiting 
at Holyhead for the Irish packet. They were first printed by Mr. Craik, 
Sivift, Appendix IX. 



JONATHAN SWIFT 229 

more tracts on Irish matters, urging on the Irish people, as 
he had always done, habits of self-help, and a temper of 
self-assertion. These later pamphlets show a most poignant 
se^jse of the misery of the great mass of the Roman 
Citcholic peasantry. The most famous of them, A Modest 
Proposal, in which he suggests that the infant children of 
the peasantry be used as food, so far from being as it is 
often regarded, a piece of cold-blooded brutality, is a cry 
of despairing pity and anger, wrung from Swift at a time 
when all over Ireland the wretched cotters were dying of 
famine by hundreds and left unburied before their own 
doors, while absentee landlords were spending their rents 
in England. Swift himself was still faithful to his clerical 
duties in these latest years, and a score of stories attest his 
personal benevolence, his rough but kindly helpfulness. 
He sadly owned that It was the necessity of his nature "to 
hate and detest that animal called man" ; but he had always 
pity and aid for individual members of the species. His 
services for Irish liberty had won him the hearts of all the 
humble folk In Ireland, Catholic and Protestant alike. He 
gave a woman a guinea, one day, to buy a gown, stipulating 
only that It should be of Irish stuff; she came back shortly 
with a full set of his books, protesting, "Faith, your rever- 
ence, they're the best Irish stuff I know." Over the mob of 
Dublin, he was, says Orrery, "the most absolute monarch 
that ever ruled men." And he used his mastery well. He 
was enraged at Irish servility, but he would not flatter 
Irish grandiloquence or countenance Irish lawlessness. 
When Archbishop Boulter, the rancorous primate who gov- 
erned the Irish church on the narrowest Whig principles, 
once complained that Swift fostered disaffection In the 
Dublin populace. Swift retorted, "if I had lifted my hand, 
they would have torn you in a thousand pieces." 

But nothing could much relieve the deepening gloom 
that was settling about Swift's life. The death of Stella 
left him alone. He had gathered about him a small circle 
of acquaintance, but no friends to take the place of the 
old ones. His most Intimate companions after 1730 were 



230 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Dr. Delany, a fellow of Trinity, now remembered chiefly as 
lucky enough to marry a bright woman, — also of Swift's 
circle, — who wrote a charming diary; and one Thomas 
Sheridan, a careless, happy-go-lucky Irish schoolmaster, 
who was blest with good wits but with no sense to itse 
them. Swift found much diversion in Sheridan's rough- 
and-ready Irish wit : they wrote each other doggerel verse, 
badgered each other in execrable puns, and between them 
both wrote nonsense enough to fill a good-sized volume. 
Swift tried also to knock a little hard sense into the rather 
roomy head of his friend; but he never had much success 
in that attempt. He still kept up his correspondence with 
the old London circle, but there is in his letters the melan- 
choly assurance of final separation. And as one after an- 
other they began to drop away his own hopeless isolation 
became intolerable. "Within the past twenty years," he 
wrote Pope in 1736, "I have lost twenty-seven great men of 
art and learning. I have nobody left but you now." In 
that year his illness ^ began to assume the form that he 
had so long dreaded ; his mental powers began to fail rapidly. 
This decline continued, accompanied by periods of intense 
physical agony until the summer of 1742; then, after some 
weeks of most acute suffering, he sank into a state of torpor 
that lasted until the end. He died October 19, 1745. 



XIII 

Swift owes his eminence not to a facile and cultivated 
genius like Addison's, or to a carefully developed literary 
art like Pope's. He was not a man of large attainments 
or of great breadth of mind. He had not the charm of 
urbane manners; he was indifferent to all the studied niceties 
of literature. It was his tremendous force of character that 
lifted him above his contemporaries. No other English- 
man of that half century has impressed his personality so 
deeply upon our imagination. All the men of his time seem 

*The physicians in recent times pronounce Swift's malady to be labyrin- 
thine vertigo or Meniere's disease. 



JONATHAN SWIFT 231 

pale and tame beside his stern, proud figure. The few who 
loved him and the many who feared him, alike bowed before 
that imperious personality. Even in the little circle of his 
great friends in London there was always some tacit recog- 
nition of his dominance. Of all that circle it was Arbuthnot 
who knew him best and loved him most; yet in Arbuthnot's 
delightful letters to Swift there is a tone of deference not 
heard in his other correspondence. "He was always 
alone," says Thackeray. 

Force of character like this always implies positiveness 
of conviction united with energy of will. Swift's range of 
intellectual interests was not very wide, but within its limits 
his judgments were inflexible. He was not one of those 
easy men who are ready to admit that much may be said on 
both sides. With reference to most matters on which it 
seemed to him worth while to think at all, he had made up 
his mind; and he had no patience with the hesitating temper 
that takes credit to itself for liberality and openness of view. 
He had, in its most dogmatic form, the eighteenth century 
confidence in the infallibility of reason. He held that in all 
important matters a needful amount of truth is always ac- 
cessible to honest search; doubt or dispute about it, there- 
fore, implied either feebleness of mind, which roused his 
contempt, or wilful blindness, which roused his anger. In 
the last book of Gulliver the gray Houyhnhnm finds it very 
difficult to understand what men can mean by that word 
"opinion," or how any point can be disputable. For among 
the noble Houyhnhnms, says Gulliver, reason is not "a point 
problematical, as with us, where men can argue with plausi- 
bility on both sides of the question; but strikes you with 
immediate conviction as it must needs do where it is not 
mingled, obscured, or discolored, by passion and interest." 
When such positiveness of conviction is backed by corre- 
sponding energy of will, the man may be domineering and 
arrogant, but he is irresistible. Constrained by the very 
honesty of his convictions to tolerate no difference of opinion 
and to allow no compromise, he imputes all intelligent op- 
position to obstinacy and bears it down by sheer personal 



232 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

force. This, it may be admitted, was Swift's method. 
Among friends of similar views to his own he was a most 
dehghtful companion, with a humor and imagination quite 
unmatched in his age. Nor did he invite controversy; on 
the contrary, he always deprecated the intrusion into society 
of those political topics that separated old friends, and his 
long friendship with Addison is proof of his willingness to 
exclude all cause for difference from their acquaintance. 
Controversy once begun, though, he gave his adversary no 
alternative but to succumb or retire. He was impatient of 
contradiction even from his friends; and showed a lack of 
intellectual sympathy which was a part of the price of his 
personal power. 

It was this intense personality that made Swift's sense of 
failure so tragic. For natures like his do not brook defeat. 
They will not learn to adapt themselves and make the best 
of things. They cannot believe themselves meant for fail- 
ure. And in fact they do not often fail. To change Fortius' 
old proverb a little, they may not deserve success but they 
will command it. Yet adverse circumstances may sometimes 
thwart powers that no rival could surpass and no enemy 
withstand. That seemed Swift's fate. He was hampered 
by poverty and isolation in his early life; he was connected 
during his best years with a party that was successful only 
for a few months and never represented a majority that was 
permanent or ideas that were progressive; he was exiled 
just at his meridian to a country he hated, and was sur- 
rounded by a people whom he could not help despising even 
while he served them. Thus he was condemned all his days 
to chafe under the conviction of great possibilities he might 
never realize. Only once did he find a scene in which he 
could give his powers full swing; and then only long enough 
to make more bitter the enforced inactivity or uncongenial 
effort to which he was remanded for the rest of his life. 
Moreover a merciless disease was creeping surely upon him, 
and he knew it. "I shall be like that tree," said he to a 
friend once, pointing to a blasted elm. "I shall die at the 
top." Add to adverse fortune the agonizing prescience of 



JONATHAN SWIFT 233 

this doom, — for Scott assigned this remark to the year 1717, 
— and we shall not wonder that this eager but baffled spirit 
consumed itself in hopeless anger till it passed to where — in 
the words he wrote for his own epitaph — Sava indignatio 
cor ulterius lacerare nequit. 

If the account of Swift's career given in the foregoing 
pages be correct, it is evident that he was not guilty of some 
of the charges that have been brought against him. He was 
no time-server or turn-coat in politics. He was not heartless 
or fickle in his relations with those two women whose story 
is so strangely twined with his. Still less was he a hypocrite. 
No more sincere man ever lived. In fact, his consuming 
hatred of shams was the motive of most of his work. He 
was what Bolingbroke well called "a hypocrite reversed" 
and had a morbid dread of seeming what he was not. It 
was this that caused him sometimes to belie in outward 
seeming his own best qualities, and occasioned grave mis- 
understanding of his character. Thus he certainly was not a 
cold-blooded cynic; but he sometimes seemed one. Friend- 
ship never lay deeper in any man's heart than in his, or took 
stronger hold on any life. He loved his friends sincerely, 
and they loved him, — the wisest and best of them loved him 
most. Their sorrows and bereavements smote him to the 
heart. Some of his letters of sympathy and condolence — 
to Harley, to Pope, to Arbuthnot, to Lady Betty Germaine 
— are among the noblest and most moving ever penned. 
But, as is often the case with such rugged natures, he had a 
distrust of all emotion as a sign of weakness; and was so in- 
tolerant of sentimentality that he often seemed devoid of 
sentiment. Not only was he too bluntly honest to express 
any emotion that he did not feel, but he pushed his dread of 
dissimulation so far that he refused to adopt the conven- 
tionalities of sympathy, and often gave offense by what 
seemed brutal frankness or indifference. He refuses to join 
with the ministers in their expressions of pity and humanity 
for their old enemy, Godolphin, simply because "he is dead 
and can do them no hurt." He bluntly expresses his im- 
patience at Mrs. Masham's anxiety over her sick child at a 



234 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

moment when great affairs demand her attention. Some- 
times, indeed, he cynically depreciates our most instinctive 
affections on the ground that they warp our judgment and 
are inconsistent with rational attachment. Such passages 
really indicate, not that he was himself incapable of these 
affections, but on the contrary, that he felt himself liable to 
be softened or misled by their excess. Moreover, it must 
be admitted that his own emotions, though they had great 
depth and intensity, were singularly deficient in delicacy. In 
his relations with other people he had almost none of that 
power to appreciate finer shades of feeling upon which quick- 
ness of sympathy depends. His nature was too robust and 
strenuous to admit any possibilities of grace or refinement; 
and much attention to the amenities of life seemed to him 
inconsistent with sincerity and earnestness. 

Much of Swift's seeming irreverence may be explained in 
a similar way. A careful reading of his letters and works 
will convince any candid person that he was at heart a 
reverent man. In the presence of the great mysteries of re- 
ligion he bows with silent awe. But if he had reverence for 
truth, he never had any sympathetic respect for what he 
thought surely false, simply because other people thought it 
true. Such a compliance seemed to him a kind of treachery 
to his own convictions. Lacking, as has been said, in in- 
tellectual sympathy and in delicate consideration for the 
feelings of others, he often, by his very sincerity, seemed to 
pass into almost brutal irreverence, and gave offense which 
he himself could never understand. The Tale of a Tub, for 
instance, has shocked many people by its ruthless satire upon 
doctrines and usages which they hold sacred, or at all events 
regard as invested with sacred associations even if they do 
not accept them. But to Swift these things were simply not 
true. They were part of that mass of delusion which arro- 
gance had foisted upon superstition; they belonged to the 
army of shams against which he felt consuming indignation. 
This being so, he never could understand why any one who 
disbelieved them should object to ridiculing them. As to his 
own religious attitude, his dread of anything like pretense 



JONATHAN SWIFT 235 

exaggerated the healthy reserve that most men feel in the 
expression of religious sentiments into a morbid reticence 
and concealment. He followed almost too literally the 
Scriptural exhortation to secrecy both in his charities and in 
his devotions. Yet surely no man has a right to impugn his 
sincerity. He believed his creed. He accepted its mysteries, 
and had nothing but contempt for those flippant coffee- 
house skeptics who glibly professed to believe nothing they 
could not understand. Whether he knew much of the in- 
spiration and the consolations of Christianity may perhaps 
admit of a mournful doubt. His belief hardly rose into 
that faith which can be hopeful In the presence of the uni- 
versal spectacle of folly and sin. The grim picture of the 
world's wrong was always before his eyes : that, in spite of it, 
he held any silent belief is surely proof, not of hypocrisy, but 
of profound intellectual conviction. 

But it Is Swift's misanthropy that has done most to turn 
the verdict of posterity against him. Men cannot be ex- 
pected to think well of him; for he didn't think well of men. 
This misanthropy did not show itself in any repellent form 
until after the great disappointment of his exile to Ireland 
In 17 14. Yet the seeds of it were in his nature. No man 
was ever so endowed with the satiric gift to detect unveraci- 
tles, to pierce through all conventions, to see how little sub- 
stance is concealed by the big shows of life. And this gift is 
always fatal to its possessor unless it be balanced by a power 
to see also the manifold good of life and tempered by that 
charity which believeth and hopeth. He who does not love 
men will soon lose faith in them; then, the keener his vision, 
the sterner his sense of right, the more intense will be his 
indignation against his kind. And indignation, even right- 
eous indignation, is not a mood in which any man may live 
happily or beneficently. Now in those redeeming graces 
that sweeten the satiric temper, Swift was by nature deficient. 
His affections, as we have seen, were deep — perhaps all 
the deeper and more impetuous because confined to so nar- 
row a channel; but he never had much genial humanity. The 
broad injunction of the second commandment he avowed 



236 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

himself unable to keep. This unfortunate temper would 
probably, in any case, have grown more bitter with advanc- 
ing years; age dispels some generous illusions even for the 
most charitable man. But in Swift it was frightfully ex- 
aggerated by disappointment and disease. In his later years 
he too often lost all power of discrimination in his all- 
embracing hatred of the race; and his anger at our sins was 
swallowed up in his contempt for our weakness. 

But here again let us at least give Swift credit for 
sincerity. He was none of your easy gentlemen, who preach 
vanitas vanitatum in a graceful and superior manner. He 
never heightened his indignation for declamatory effect, — as 
Carlyle did, — or made literary capital of his misanthropy. 
The black side of life gradually filled all his vision; he did 
not love it, but he could not thrust it away. This suggests 
the true explanation for the passages of extreme physical 
grossness that sometimes offend us in his writing. They are 
due in part, no doubt, to his lack of delicacy and his bold 
defiance of all conventions. Yet he was himself a scrupu- 
lously clean man in his habits and conversation, — far more 
so than Pope, — and rebuked any violations of decency by 
others with unsparing severity. The truth seems to be, it 
was a mark of the morbid perversity of his temper that 
whatsoever was most displeasing to him forced itself most 
persistently into his thought. He dwells upon filth not be- 
cause he loves it, but because he hates it. He disgusts us 
by the expression of his own disgust. This tendency in- 
creased In his later years, and Delany Is doubtless right In 
taking It as a symptom of mental unsoundness. In truth the 
last word with reference to Swift should always be that 
whatever In his character most needs excuse was due in part 
to Incurable physical disease — in how large part, only He 
can tell who so strangely joins these minds and bodies of 
ours, and to whom alone belongeth judgment. 



ROBERT BURNS 

IT is hard to fix on any date or name that may mark with 
accuracy the beginning of a new literary era ; changes in 
literary manner are gradual, and you may find in Gold- 
smith, or still more in Cowper, notes of the new music and 
some breath of the new inspiration. But it seems to me that 
the new poetry began in a harvest-field of Scotland, on the 
skirts of the pleasant valley of the Ayr, in the autumn of 
1773. In accordance with the old Scottish fashion each man 
and boy of the reapers has his partner among the women 
and girls of the harvest folk. Among all the lassies none 
sings more sweetly than trim little Nellie Kilpatrick, the 
daughter of the blacksmith at Ayr, She is but fourteen 
and her partner not quite a year older, proud that this year 
'first among the yellow corn, a man he reckoned is.' Here, 
by your leave, Messrs, Pope and Gay and Shenstone, here is 
a bit of genuine pastoral. Nellie sings divinely — albeit 
mostly to one tune; and the words are wretched doggerel 
some country laird has written to his lady. But the notes 
of her song, as they two loiter behind the rest when they 
fare home from the harvest-field in the twilight, have 
touched in the heart of the boy that chord which was hardly 
ever to be still again so long as he lived. 

I see her yet, the sonsie quean 
That lighted up my jingle, 
Her witching smile, her pauky een. 
That gart my heart-strings tingle! 
I, fired inspired, 

At ev'ry kindling keek, 
But, bashing and dashing, 
I feared ay to speak. 

But why not tell it in a song, fitted to the air she her- 
self was so often singing. He could at least write as good 
a one as the country laird. And thus love awoke the music : 

237 



238 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

O, once I lov'd a bonie lass, 

Ay, and I love her still! 
And whilst that virtue vrarms my breast 

I'll love my handsome Nell. 

As bonie lasses I hae seen. 

And monie full as braw, 
But for a modest gracefu' mien 

The like I never saw. 

She dresses aye sae clean and neat, 

Both decent and genteel ; 
And then there's something in her gait 

Gars onie dress look weel. 

A gaudy dress and gentle air 

May slightly touch the heart; 
But it's innocence and modesty 

That polishes the dart. 

'Tis this in Nelly pleases me, 

'Tis this enchants my soul; 
For absolutely in my breast 

She reigns without controul. 

This, as he used always after to say, was Robert Burns' 
first love and first song. I think we may call it the beginning 
of our new poetry. But we shall mistake if we think this 
bit of pretty pastoral came out of a sunny and quiet life. 
Assuredly the life of this man, Robert Burns, was a tragedy 
if any ever was, and the tragedy had already begun. His 
father clearly enough was a man of much native judgment 
and penetration, a stern, yet kindly, observant, patient, 
God-fearing man. But he wore his life slowly out in the 
silent struggle to wring from seven poor acres barely bread 
enough to keep his family from starvation — bread literally, 
"for years butcher's meat was unknown in our house," says 
one of the brothers. 

At thirteen Robert was threshing all day with the men. 
At sixteen his shoulders were rounded; he went to bed every 
night with dull headache, with frequent faintness, and a 
feeling of suffocation. And the worst was, all would not 



ROBERT BURNS 239 

suffice. Every year saw the old father steadily weakening, 
and the whole family, with a proud Scottish dread of beg- 
gary, drawing nearer the desperate verge of want. Robert 
was naturally gay and buoyant, with an immense fund of 
animal spirits ; but his life already told upon him. He was 
moody and often depressed as no boy of fifteen ought ever 
to be. Poverty when it pinches but moderately and only 
seems to brace the young man's power to more resolute 
effort, is often a great blessing; but poverty like that of 
Robert Burns is a curse which has slight mitigations. For 
it isn't merely physical privations and hardship that such 
poverty brings. This young man has intellectual cravings; 
but there are no libraries and universities for him. This 
young Robert Burns has a vivid imagination, a prompt un- 
erring taste; but the great world of literature is all but 
closed to him. He reads over the few books he can find 
at home ; besides the big ha' Bible, there was a Spectator, a 
Pope, a Locke On the Human Understanding, and The 
Whole Duty of Man; in none of which save the Bible would 
he be likely to find much. He borrows books when he can, 
gets a look into Shakespeare, and best of all finds a collection 
of old Scots songs, which he learns by heart. But this is 
about all the young poet can get before he is eighteen. 

Then, too, this young man has native social gifts of the 
rarest sort; wit, exuberant spirits, keen penetration, versa- 
tility, tact, and that rare power of ardent, fascinating con- 
verse which was afterward to astonish for a little time the 
great people of Edinburgh. "Why, sir, his conversation set 
me completely off my feet," said the lively Duchess of 
Gordon, you remember. Such a young fellow must have 
vague, half-conscious, social longings and aspirations : he 
needs the stimulating and refining companionship of those 
who can appreciate and exercise his powers. But what so- 
ciety can young Robert Burns have? His brilliant con- 
versation is squandered upon those who toil with him in the 
peat-bog or at the plow-tail. His tender heart and kindling 
fancy made him, in turn, the devotee of almost every comely 
girl in the parish ; but it is doubtful whether in all the little 



240 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

circle of those to whom he dared lift his thought there was 
one who could write her name. You recall the arch humor 
and independence of the verses he wrote on Miss Jennie 
Ronalds who lived in the big house, and whose father was 
supposed to have something handsome to give away with his 
girl when the fit suitor should come : 

To proper young men, he'll clink in the hand, 
Gowd guineas a bunder or two, man. 

I lo'e her mysel, but darena weel tell, 

My poverty keeps me in awe, man ; 
For making o' rhymes, and working at times, 

Does little or naething at a', man. 

Yet I wadna choose to let her refuse, 
Nor hae 't in her power to say na, man : 

For though I be poor, unnoticed, obscure, 
My stomach's as proud as them a', man. 

I never was canny for hoarding o' money, 

Or claughtin't together at a', man ; 
I've little to spend and naething to lend. 

But devil a shilling I awe, man. 

It is dangerous thus to confine a young man's regard to 
those who are so much his inferiors, and to shut up too 
straitly such powers and such desires. If they cannot find 
outlet in one way, they will in another. Before he is twenty 
young Burns is already beginning to show a restless discon- 
tent with his lot, and breaks out now and then in moody 
defiance of those proprieties upon which the inequality of 
society seems to depend. 

Yet up to the age of twenty-three his life, if cramped 
and meager, is yet a pure and manly one. He is under his 
father's roof, where the light of a holy piety shines, calm 
and steady. And with all the hardships of his lot, there 
are compensations: he has the light spirits, the quenchless 
hope of youth, self-respect and independence, sympathies 
quick and unsullied, and an imagination that can shed a 
freshening light over all the homely routine of his life. 



ROBERT BURNS 241 

In days when daisies deck the ground, 

And blackbirds whistle clear, 
With honest joy our hearts will bound, 
To see the coming year: 

On braes when we please then, 
We'll sit an' sowth a tune; 
Syne rhyme till 't we'll time till't, 
An' sing 't when we hae done. 

It's no in titles nor in rank: 

It's no in wealth like Lon'on Bank, 

To purchase peace and rest. 
It's no in makin muckle, mair; 
It's no in books, it's no in lear, 

To make us truly blest: 
If happiness hae not her seat 

An' centre in the breast, 
We may be wise, or rich, or great, 
But never can be blest! 

Nae treasures nor pleasures 

Could make us happy lang; 
The heart ay's the part ay 

That makes us right or wrang. 

Good philosophy as well as good poetry that, and Burns 
doubtless had occasion in those early years to put it often 
to the test. 

But it is from his twenty-third year that I should date a 
new chapter in the history of Burns. Early in that year, 
there happened to Burns that event which has made an era in 
the life of many a young fellow — a certain young lady said 
No. The rather unpoetic name which Burns wished this 
young lady to change seems to have been Begbie. She was 
the daughter of a country farmer, and out at service; but 
from what is known of her, one judges her to have been 
a girl of tact and art, and withal fairly well educated. 
Burns' letters to Miss Elison Begbie are manly and noble, — 
much better love-letters, I am bound to say, than he ever 
wrote again. And it was to her that he wrote a series of 
his best love lyrics. All those familiar with Scottish song 
will recall that charming melody My Nannie O, with the 
words which Burns fitted to it; and some students of Burns 



242 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

think that Elison Begble is the object of that best of all his 
early love song, Mary Morison. 

O Mary, at thy window be! 

It is the wish'd, the trysted hour. 
Those smiles and glances let me see, 

That make the miser's treasure poor. 
How blythely wad I bide the stoure, 

A weary slave frae sun to sun, 
Could I the rich reward secure — 

The lovely Mary Morison ! 

But Mary Morison was thrifty as well as bonny, and Rab 
Burns was very poor and not like to be richer: and so she 
said No. I. think it a pity. It is idle, doubtless, to con- 
jecture what might have been, — yet it seems to me here was 
a woman not too far above him in social rank who might, 
nevertheless, have proved a companion for Burns, the poet, 
as well as Burns, the peasant. Sure I am he never found 
such an one again. 

But worse things befell Burns in this year. Near the 
close of it, soon after he had received his last letter from 
Elison Begbie, he went away to the neighboring sea-coast 
town of Irvine to learn the manufacture of flax, hoping 
thereby to eke out a little the slender income of the family. 
He carried away with him a heart smarting some, it may be, 
from Mary Morison's refusal, and certainly embittered and 
reckless at the vexations of his lot. And he carried it to a 
bad place. Irvine was a vile little town; and the companions 
Burns met there — sailors and smugglers — louder and wilder 
than any he had before consorted with. One among them, 
especially, who had knocked about the world a good deal 
and whose gay wit and adventurous temper had a charm 
for Burns, taught the young Ayrshire peasant that devil's 
own lie, that purity is a childish virtue, and that a certain 
modicum of vice is a manly accomplishment for any young 
fellow. "His friendship did me much harm," said Burns 
a few years later. In sad truth it did — and the fruits of it 
were too soon evident. Burns came home from Irvine to 
find his father, worn out at last, on his death-bed. "I'm 



ROBERT BURNS 243 

troubled," said the dying old man, "I'm troubled for one o' 
my boys." "O, father, is it me ye mean?" said Robert, 
bursting into tears. "Aye, Rab, it is," the old father could 
only falter. His forebodings were but too true, and before 
the father had been in his grave a twelvemonth, his son 
Robert, his good name smirched, and — what was worse — 
with a blot on the native purity and delicacy of his feelings, 
was writing for the first time verses such as he should never 
have written, verses in which he vainly strives to glory in 
his shame and to drown in bravado the monitions of a 
wounded conscience. 

We cannot forget, indeed, that the short life of this man 
was darkened by sins as well as by sorrows; nor need we try 
to forget. It is no real charity to overlook the dark facts in 
any man's career. Let us know the truth. But we ought to 
remember that in the case of any poet, certainly any poet so 
frank and impulsive as Burns, the life must be judged by 
the writings, and not the writings by the life. The free open 
joyousness, the manly honesty that hated sham and cant, 
the religious sensibilities he got from his father and never 
wholly lost, the struggling aspirations of the man, his soft 
pity and tenderness, his tremulous susceptibility to whatever 
is pure and gentle : all these things we see in the poetry; and 
they are the real Burns, — the heart of him. For it isn't so 
much what a man does, as what he tries to do, or even longs 
to do, that we should remember: 

What's done we partly may compute 
But know not what's resisted. 

A short time before the death of their father. Burns and 
his brother Gilbert had leased the small farm of Mossgiel, 
near Mauchline, and thither they now removed, with their 
mother and sister, and such fragments as they could save 
from the wreck of the family fortunes. Robert now set 
himself at work with the desperate resolve to be a thrifty 
farmer. "I read farming books," says he, "I calculated 
crops. I attended markets, and in short, in spite of the devil, 
the world, and the flesh, I believe I should have been a wise 



244 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

man : but the first year from unfortunately buying bad seed, 
the second from a late harvest we lost half our crops. 
This overset all my wisdom." I am afraid that the world, 
the flesh, and the devil must share with bad crops and bad 
seed the responsibility for Burns' failure as farmer; but it is 
to be noted that during these two years of comparative 
thrift and persistence he produced more poetry than during 
all the rest of his life put together. If he could have been 
content with his lot, and grown old as peasant poet, un- 
spoiled by praise and undisturbed by the restless longings of 
more idle ambitions, who shall say what stores of humor, of 
wisdom, and of pathos his ripened experience might have 
left us. For early and late it was only when upon his farm 
that Burns was a poet. But here for a little time he kept 
himself steady to one course of life. If he was shut out 
from all high converse with books and men, he sought the 
more the companionship of his own imagination. He lived 
out of doors with his eyes and his heart open to the charms 
of rural nature, and in the lives of the homely cottagers 
about him he saw — more clearly perhaps than he could in a 
more artificial society — those truths of human nature that 
are good for all men and all times. It was in the Mossgiel 
field that the mouse, "wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie," 
ran from his ruined nest to be immortalized in pitying verse 
which we shall remember so long as 

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men 

Gang aft agley, 
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, 

For promis'd joy. 

And it was in the Mauchline church, I take it, that the 
"ugly, creepin', blastit wonner" on 

The vera topmost, tow'ring height 
O' Miss's bonnet 

suggested to Burns the wish we can all take to heart, 

O wad some Power the giftie gie us, 
To see oursels as ithers see us ! 



ROBERT BURNS 245 

His Pegasus was his old mare, Maggie, and his choicest 
inspiration came to him at the plow-tail. He composed his 
verses mostly out of doors, while plodding slow in the fur- 
row, or digging in the peat-bog, and then at evening shutting 
himself into his little attic chamber wrote them out by the 
light of a single candle and laid them away in the drawer of 
an old deal table, where his sister would steal up to read 
them while he was in the fields at work. Mrs. Oliphant 
remarks that by the early summer of 1786 there must have 
been more good poetry in the drawer of that attic table 
than could have been found in manuscript anywhere else in 
Europe, — unless possibly it were in the portfolio of Herr 
Goethe in Weimar. For my part, I should be inclined to 
say more. This poetry that for two years this man has been 
putting into this attic drawer, if you measure it by the 
variety of high poetic qualities it has, — imagination, melody, 
humor, pathos, pithy human wisdom, — and I am sure that if 
you measure it by its power to meet our daily human sym- 
pathies, — "to come home to men's business and bosoms", — 
you will have to say of this drawer full of verse that no one 
writer between William Shakespeare and Robert Burns 
can show any body of poetry to match it. And yet it has 
been written by a plowman, only twenty-seven years old, who 
was never more than about a dozen miles from the smoke 
of his cottage and never saw a city, who has never owned 
a score of books in his life, whose only friends are plain 
country folk with no relish of letters, who has never had a 
word of distinctly literary criticism, guidance, or suggestion 
from any one, and who has never printed a line. Here as- 
suredly is a fact worthy the notice of the historian of litera- 
ture. 

Meantime the farm was a failure; and other things 
were going very sadly. In the summer of 1786 came the 
crisis that ends the first chapter of Burns' life. It was a 
year or more before when Burns, walking into Mauchline 
village, had first seen the comely face of Jean Armour. Miss 
Jean was spreading out linen upon the grass to bleach, and 
as Rab Burns' ever present dog came frisking over it she 



246 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

threw a stone at the dog and a word at its master. "Lassie," 
said Burns with a laugh in his eye, "Lassie, if ye thought 
oght o' me, ye wadna hurt my dog." 'T said to mysel," 
said Jean in telling the story long after, "I said to mysel, I 
wadna think much o' you at ony rate."" But Jean reckoned 
without her host : Rab Burns was never again to be long out 
of her thought or her life. The next spring, 1786, to shield 
so far as possible her honor and his own. Burns gave to 
Jean Armour privately a written agreement of marriage 
which was binding before the Scottish law. About the 
same time, Burns, harassed by the increasing hardships of 
his lot, resolved to try to mend his fortunes abroad. He 
accepted a position as bookkeeper on the estate of a Mr. 
Douglas in Jamaica. He had not even the few pounds 
necessary to pay his passage, and to get them he resolved, 
at the suggestion of his friend, Gavin Hamilton, to print 
the verses that lay in the drawer of that attic table. All 
this in March of 1786. It seems to me certain from the 
letters of the poet that it was about the first of April — 
after Burns had taken his resolution to go to Jamaica, and 
not before, as all the biographies say or imply — that Jean 
Armour's father discovered the relations between Burns and 
his daughter. James Payne, the novelist, tells somewhere 
in his Reminiscences of a hard-headed Scotchman who rec- 
ommended most warmly the moral character of one of his 
young friends, and on being reminded of some rather dark 
facts in the young fellow's record rejoined eagerly — "Hoot, 
man ! that's not what I mean by immoral; but gamblin,' and 
sic things as ye lose money by!" Old Armour's standard of 
morality seems to have been of that kind; for he cared less 
for the reputation of his daughter than for her fortune. He 
would not consent that girl of his should for any reason 
whatever become the wife of so poor and shiftless a fellow 
as Robert Burns; and insisted that she destroy the marriage 
contract. Jean consented, — too willingly, Burns thought; 
the writing was torn up; Jean went away from Mauchline, 
and the father threatened young Burns with legal proceed- 
ings. Sad and pitiful details, over which one would not 



ROBERT BURNS 247 

wish to linger : but they cannot be forgotten in recounting 
the career of the poet; for they really did much to shorten 
and darken that career. Burns had blighted his future; his 
work as a poet in fact was nearly done before a single line 
of his poetry had been printed. More than nine-tenths of 
all the poems we know and love were written before he left 
Mossgiel. 

The later biographers of Burns have obliged us — some- 
what reluctantly — to believe that it is in this same unlucky 
spring of 1786, that we must place the pathetic story, — best 
known of all that find record in Burns' life, — the story of 
Highland Mary. Yet we must not accuse him of cold hy- 
pocrisy or downright treachery. In April Burns found that 
Jean had disavowed the marriage plight, had consented to 
the destruction of the sacred paper, and had gone away 
from Mauchline. He was torn by a throng of conflicting 
emotions, in which sorrow for his own sin, remorseful pity 
for Jean's future, and hot indignation at her seeming weak- 
ness and treachery were strangely mingled. This tumult of 
feeling is seen in the odes, To Despondency and To Ruin, in 
that touching poem, The Lament, and in the more familiar 
lines to that daisy which one day in that same April he saw 
roll down under the turning sod as he plodded wearily be- 
hind the plow : — 

Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow'r, 

Thou's met me in an evil hour; 

For I maun crush amang the stoure 

Thy slender stem : 
To spare thee now is past my pow'r, 

Thou bonie gem. 

Alas! it's no thy neebor sweet. 
The bonie lark, companion meet, 
Bending thee 'mang the dewy weet, 

Wi' spreckl'd breast! 
When upward-springing, blythe, to greet 

The purpling east. 

There, in thy scanty mantle clad, 
Thy snawie bosom sun-ward spread, 



248 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Thou lifts thy unassuming head 

In humble guise; 
But now the share uptears thy bed, 

And low thou lies! 

Such is the fate of simple Bard, 

On Life's rough ocean luckless starr'd ! 

Unskilful he to note the card 

Of prudent lore, 
Till billows rage, and gales blow hard, 

And whelm him o'er! 

Ev'n thou who mourn'st the Daisy's fate, 
That fate is thine — no distant date; 
Stern Ruin's plough-share drives elate, 

Full on thy bloom, 
Till crush'd beneath the furrow's weight. 

Shall be thy doom! 

It is easy to say how a man of firmer fiber and more 
noble character might have borne himself in such circum- 
stances; but it seems to me very natural that Burns with his 
volatile temper and his hunger for affection should just then 
accept first the gentle pity of Highland Mary, and then the 
love to which that pity is proverbially akin. Of Mary 
Campbell we really know nothing save that she had once 
been a dairy maid, and was now at service in the family of 
Burns' friend, Hamilton. But oiie thinks she must have 
been a girl whose sweet modesty had something firm and 
self-respecting in it. Certain it is that the few verses Burns 
addressed to her, or which enshrine this Mary of his, have 
not only tenderness and ardor, but respect as well. I feel 
sure that this Highland lass seemed to Burns in that spring 
of 1786 the embodiment of purity and truth, and that 
thoughts of her could summon whatever of firm resolve and 
chaste affection was yet possible to him. She was, you know, 
the Mary in memory of whom he wrote that song which to 
so many of us is among the recollections of our childhood, 
sung by lips over which nothing impure could ever breathe, — 
"Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes." 

We all remember the oft-told story, — how on the 14th 



ROBERT BURNS 249 

of May they met and parted for the last time, by the banks 
of Ayr, exchanged their Bibles, and standing one on either 
side of the stream with hands clasped over the murmuring 
water pledged their lasting love and faith. Burns expected 
before the summer was over to go to Jamaica; and Mary 
was starting for her home in the Highlands whence she was 
to return to meet — it seems likely to wed — her lover before 
he crossed the sea. But Burns was never to go to the Indies ; 
and poor Mary was never to return from the Highlands 
or to see his face again. The scene of that parting might 
well be a shrine for lovers' and for poets' visits : and I can 
aver that one humble pilgrim who could not claim to belong 
to either class, when he first found his way, one summer 
afternoon not many years since, to that secluded spot, felt 
that the charm of the poet's love and verse was upon it yet, 
and that in the tranquil beauty of leafy glade and gurgling 
brook the wish in the opening stanza of that sweetest and 
saddest of songs still found fulfillment: 

Ye banks and braes and streams around 

The castle o' Montgomery, 
Green be your woods, and fair your flowers, 

Your waters never dnjmlie! 
There summer first unfald her robes. 

And there the langest tarry ! 
For there I took the last fareweel 

O' my sweet Highland Mary! 

How sweetly bloom'd the gay, green birk. 

How rich the hawthorn's blossom. 
As underneath their fragrant shade 

I clasp'd her to my bosom! 
The golden hours on angel wings, 

Flew o'er me and my dearie ; 
For dear to me as light and life 

Was my sweet Highland Mary. 

Wi' monie a vow, and lock'd embrace 

Our parting was fu' tender; 
And, pledging aft to meet again, 

We tore oursels asunder. 
But O, fell Death's untimely frost, 



250 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

That nipt my flower sae early ! 
Now green's the sod, and cauld's the clay, 
That wraps my Highland Mary! 

O pale, pale now, those rosy lips, 

I aft hae kiss'd sae fondly; 
An closed for ay, the sparkling glance. 

That dwalt on me sae kindly; 
And mouldering now in silent dust 

That heart that lo'ed me dearly! 
But still within my bosom's core 

Shall live my Highland Mary. 

On the events of that unhappy summer it is not necessary 
to linger. In July came the publication of the poems. 
The fame of them ran quickly through the poet's native 
Ayrshire, and doors were open to the young fellow where 
he had never been known before. Some copies got to Edin- 
burgh, and there among the dons the verdict was the same 
as among the country folk. And finally one day in October, 
the great Professor Dugald Stewart of Edinburgh Univer- 
sity, staying for some weeks in the country near Mauchline, 
invited the peasant poet to dine, and the guest that sits next 
him at dinner is a real lord, — 

October twenty-third, 
A ne'er-to-be forgotten day, 
Sae far I sprachl'd up the brae 

I dinner'd wi' a Lord. 

All this could not but start new hopes in the breast of 
Burns. The possibilities of a new career glimmered before 
him. His determination to go to the Indies wavered. He 
had the hearty Scottish love for his native soil, and he 
dreaded the thought of exile. And there were dearer ties, 
which, reason as he would, he could not throw off. For Jeani 
was home, with her twin babes. But, after all, there seemed 
for him no other course. He kept to his determination to 
sail for Jamaica about the last of October. He secured his 
passage. He paid his last visit to kind Dr. Lawrie, and 
walking home at nightfall across the dreary moors com- 



ROBERT BURNS 251 

posed that plaintive "Farewell," set to an old Scots air 
that moans and croons like the sighing wind over a lonely 
land: 

The gloomy night is gath'ring fast, 
Loud roars the wild inconstant blast; 
Yon murky cloud is filled with rain, 
I see it driving o'er the plain; 

Chill runs my blood to hear it rave: 
I think upon the stormy wave, 
Where many a danger I must dare, 
Far from the bonie banks of Ayr. 

'Tis not the surging billows' roar, 
'Tis not that fatal, deadly shore; 
Tho' death in ev'ry shape appear. 
The wretched have no more to fear: 
But round my heart the ties are bound. 
That heart transpierc'd with many a wound ; 
These bleed afresh, those ties I tear, 
To leave the bonie banks of Ayr. 

But just at the last minute came word again from Dr. Black- 
lock up in Edinburgh, calling for a new edition of the poems, 
and promising for them a "more universal circulation than 
anything of the kind which has been published in my 
memory." This reversed the wavering decision of the poet. 
He decided to remain in Scotland, and to go up to Edin- 
burgh to superintend the new edition of his poems that was 
to be issued there. 

So far as I can make out the dates, it could not have been 
more than a fortnight before he set out for Edinburgh that 
an incident occurred which must have added one last and 
bitterest drop to the heart full of secret sorrows which the 
young man carried with him to the scene of his triumph. 
He was at home at Mossgiel one evening when a letter was 
brought him. "He turned to the window to read it, and 
the family noted on a sudden that his face changed. He 
went out without speaking: and they respected his silence 
and said no word." That letter contained the intelligence 
that Highland Mary, having come from her home as far as 



252 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Greenock to meet Burns, had sickened there and died. 
Perhaps it was better so. 

The love where Death has set his seal, 
Nor age can chill, nor rival steal. 
Nor falsehood disavoM^. 

But with what despair of any calm and peaceful content- 
ment in his fame, must this young poet have gone up to 
meet his great friends in Edinburgh ! 

It is easy to understand why that little volume of verse 
found so many eager readers in Edinburgh; so long as 
pathos, humor, and melody are alive in the human heart 
these verses will find eager readers in every clime. But it is 
not so easy for us nowadays, living as we do after the close 
of that great poetic era which Burns began, to realize what a 
surprise this little book must have been to all lovers of 
poetry. It came at a time when the poetic muse, now grown 
a very prim and proper person, seemed about to desert 
Britain altogether. In England there was only Cowper, and 
he was not the vogue; in Scotland there was nobody. Just 
when Mr. Robert Burns came up to Edinburgh, the literary 
lions of the Scottish capital were Dr. Blair, whose rhetoric 
book our fathers used conscientiously to cram, but whose 
writings — so far as I have ever looked into them — are as 
polished and as cold as any gravestone; Dr. Beattie, whose 
long poem. The Minstrel, is a curious attempt to give a 
romantic flavor to the warmed over philosophy of Pope; 
and the "Man of Feeling" Mackenzie, editor of the 
Lounger, one of the innumerable periodicals on the model 
of the Spectator, — a pleasant, graceful, rather shallow, 
courteous man, mere Addison and water. 

Perhaps it is not easy, then, I say, to realize how wel- 
come to a society which began to weary of these feeble ar- 
tificialities in literature must have been this little book of 
homely Scottish verse, as new and fresh as if it were the first 
ever written. Here was a volume of verse with no chill 
philosophy, no attempt at courtly grace, none of the old 
academic rhetoric, and not even a couplet of the old Popish 



ROBERT BURNS 253 

sort; no more like the poetry of the old school than the song 
of a blackbird is like a lecture on ethics, and yet even the 
infallible Dr. Blair was forced to admit that it was poetry, 
and poetry of a very remarkable kind. It is now a com- 
monplace of English literary history to say that with Burns 
nature and passion, after their long absence of one hundred 
and fifty years, came back again to English verse. And in 
these particulars, the change could go no further than it goes 
in this poetry of Burns. Consider his naturalness. Of all 
our poets of anything like equal eminence. Burns is by far 
the most simple and direct in utterance. His phrase al- 
ways seems the homely, obvious one that comes unsought. 
There are no Inversions, no rhetorical devices, no sense of 
the burdensomeness of meter; he simply warmed his thought 
till it glowed, and ran melting into verse. There are num- 
berless stanzas in his verse where the simple diction and 
structure of prose seem to glide unawares into the most 
melodious poetry, — 

Ye banks and braes and streams around 
The castle o' Montgomery, 

or, again, in different voice, 

Some books are lies frae end to end, 
And some great lies were never penn'd: 
Ev'n ministers, they hae been kend, 

In holy rapture, 
A rousing whid at times to vend. 

And nail't wi' Scripture. 

The poetry of Burns is, indeed, so spontaneous and its 
charm so obvious and so homely that critical comment seems 
needless, almost impertinent. Yet this ability to set in poetry 
the beauty, humor, and pathos of a narrow and humble life, 
while you are actually living that life, so far from being a 
common endowment, is one of the very rarest. Some of 
Burns' Scottish admirers are inclined to resent the applica- 
tion of the title "peasant poet" to Burns, as seeming to imply 
that our estimate of him is based not so much upon the 



254 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

absolute poetic value of what he did, as upon a wonder that 
in his circumstances he could do anything. He is to be 
thought of as a great poet, say they, not as a peasant poet. 
Well, he was a great poet; but it is also worthy of remark, 
I think, that he is the only great English poet who really 
stands among the people while he sings. Wordsworth in 
that famous preface of his insisted that poetry could best 
find its themes in the life of humble folk; yet Wordsworth 
always regarded that life from the outside with the eye of 
a reflective observer. Though the peasant might suggest 
thought to Wordsworth, Wordsworth was very far from 
thinking like the peasant. But Burns really shared the life 
he sang, both in its outward circumstance and its inward 
character. It is this which so endears him to the popular 
heart of Scotland. No poet is so beloved, I think, by his 
own countrymen. The most rigid righteous of Scotsmen 
have some words of sympathy and excuse for Robert Burns; 
the most prosaic and untuneful feel some responsive thrill at 
the music of his song. Nor is it only in Scotland that Burns 
is thus regarded. His verses are hardly less familiar or less 
dear to all English-speaking people. Few indeed are those 
who have read any English book at all, that do not know the 
moving lines of Auld Lang Syne, or John Anderson, My Jo, 
or Flow Gently, Sweet Afton, or Highland Mary. 

But if Burns is a popular poet, he is a great poet, too. 
He belongs to the people, but he belongs also to the im- 
mortals. He has the first great gift of the poet, the gift to 
make life of deeper interest. His range of experience may 
not have been very wide : he had not the power, like Words- 
worth, to lift us to heights of calm reflection where we get 
sight of those primal spiritual truths 

Which, be they what they may, 
Are yet the fountain light of all our day; 

but no man gives us a more thrilling sympathy for all the 
common joys and sorrows of our human lot. No matter 
how narrow or how homely is the sphere in which this man's 
life must move, he throws himself into it with such abandon 



ROBERT BURNS 255 

as to make us feel afresh with him all the humor, the pathos, 
the passion, of living. 

In this passionate intensity of the man resides, I take it, 
the chief fascination of his poetry. Whenever we get a 
glimpse of him, pouring some tender confidence into the ear 
of a rustic lass, or loudest in the song at the Masons' meet- 
ing in Tarbolton, or standing with kindling eyes in the midst 
of a ring of the dons and ladies of Edinburgh delighting 
them all by his eager converse, he is always all alive with 
some emotion. How warm and tender is the heart of him! 
His pathos is so simple and honest that it starts the tear 
before we are aware. His sympathies go even beyond the 
limits of humanity, and his pity stirs for the wounded hare 
that limps past him, or "ilk happing bird, — wee, helpless 
thing," — that cowers its "chittering wing" beneath the win- 
ter's blast. There is all the tenderness and truth of long- 
tried friendship in his address to his Auld Mare Maggie : 

Monie a sair darg we twa hae wrought, 
An' wi* the weary warl' fought ! 
An' monie an anxious day, I thought 

We wad be beat! 
Yet here to crazy age we're brought, 

Wi' something yet. 

An' think na, my auld, trusty servan', 
That now perhaps thou's less deservin, 
An' thy auld days may end in starvin, 

For my last fow, 
A heapit stimpart, I'll reserve ane 

Laid by for you, — 

lines which are said to have drawn the tears and humanized 
the heart of an Edinburgh drayman. 

And yet, when in another mood who takes his joys with 
so keen a relish? There is a buoyancy in his verse that 
gives a new zest to life. He sings — and perhaps it would 
have been well had he oftener sung — the humble joys of 
the cottager when 

Th' expectant wee-things, toddlin, stacher through 
To meet their dad, wi' flichterin' noise an' glee. 



256 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

His wee bit ingle, blinkin bonilie, 

His clean hearth-stane, his thrifty wifie's smile, 

The lisping infant, prattling on his knee, 
Does a' his weary kiaugh and care beguile, 

An' makes him quite forget his labor and his toil. 

And we set the verses in memory as our choicest picture of 
the "happy fireside clime of home." Or, when his fortunes 
glower, and fate has him in a corner, he daffs her aside 
with a careless humor most contagious, — 

Whene'er I forgather wi' Sorrow and Care, 
I gie them a skelp as they're creepin alang, 
Wi' a cog o' guid swats and an auld Scottish sang, 

I whyles claw the elbow o' troublesome Thought; 

But Man is a soger, and Life is a faught. 

My mirth and guid humour are coin in my pouch, 

And my Freedom's my lairdship nae monarch daur touch. 

It must be remembered that there is more humor in the 
poetry of Burns than any other English poet since Shake- 
speare can show. It is somewhat remarkable how little 
there is of that quality in any of that company of poets of 
whom he was the immediate predecessor. Burns' humor 
runs through a wide range of moods, from the bright arch- 
ness of such songs as Tain Glen or Duncan Gray, through 
such droll waggery as that in Death and Dr. Hornbook or 
the Address to the Deil, to the rollicking fun of Tam o* 
Shanter and the wild carouse of The Jolly Beggars. But in 
all its moods there is the same bounding life, the same 
elastic force of spirit. It is never the humor of a cool and 
caustic man. Even in his satire there is nothing sullen or 
morose. He heartily dislikes what he chooses to think cant 
and hypocrisy and he heaps his ridicule upon it without stint: 

Be to the poor like onie whunstane, 
And baud their noses to the grunstane; 
Ply ev'ry art o' legal thieving; 
No matter — stick to sound believing. 

But there is at all events something open and whole-souled 
even in his abuse. He never sulks and nurses a grudge to 



ROBERT BURNS 257 

keep it warm. His ridicule always has a basis of good 
nature. You remember that even from the Father of Lies 
himself he cannot part without a word of droll commisera- 
tion: 

But fare-you-weel, Auld Nickie-Ben! 
O, wad ye tak a thought an' men, 
Ye aiblins might — I dinna ken — 
Still hae a stake: 
I'm wae to think upo' yon den, 
Ev'n for your sake ! 

In its odd mixture of waggish impudence and honest kind- 
liness this seems to me quite inimitable. Such an irrepres- 
sible flow of good spirits is there in this man. 

I fear it may be suggested that in some of his verse there 
is evidence of the flow of spirits of another kind. I sup- 
pose Burns has too much glorified the baleful power of 
Scotch drink, and I am not minded to put in any defense for 
him. Certainly I am no great lover of bacchanalian song 
myself; yet I must own myself an admirer not only of Tarn 
o' Shanter, but even of The Jolly Beggars, though neither 
of them is among the work of Burns that I think we prize 
most. I judge neither of them, however, owes much to 
drink; it is rather the rushing, heedless tide of life in them 
that captivates our attention and carries us away by main 
force. But his humor is most to my liking when it is drawn 
from no grosser inspiration than his own exuberant joyous- 
ness. Such poems as Hallowe'en or The Twa Dogs are a 
pure and healthy exhilaration of soul. 

This intensity of spirit is seen best, perhaps, in his songs, 
in his love-songs best of all. I think the love-songs of Burns 
are, on the whole, the best in the language. I could wish 
sometimes that there were a little more courtesy and defer- 
ence with their ardency; they lack perhaps something of that 
reverence which must always hallow the best love of man for 
woman. But they lack nothing else. They have imagina- 
tion, fire, tenderness, and the abandon of entire devotion. 
Earnest, simple, without a single note of affectation or pret- 
tiness, they gush warm from the heart. To say or to sing 



458 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

some of these songs is to be young again, and to feel once 
more the unslackened pulse of early love and hope. To the 
end of time will lovers go a-wooing with these verses in 
their hearts. 

And Burns has not only the poet's sensitiveness and in- 
tensity, but the poet's vision, too. His Imagination is not 
very wide-ranging, I suppose, and it certainly is not serene 
and continuous. It is the imagination that gives us sudden 
vivid glimpses, — characteristically the lyric imagination. 
What he sees, he sees with wonderful clearness and truth. 
His remarkable terseness of phrase is owing often to this 
keenness of vision: he doesn't need to heap up epithets, 
he flashes his image before you in a single phrase. Do you 
remember the two lines in his Address to the Deil — untrans- 
latable into English like most of his good things — in which 
he sees Auld Nick "on the strong-wing'd tempest flyin', 
Tirlin the kirks?" What startling distinctness in that 
glimpse of the Prince of the Power of the Air; as well as 
what perfect deviltry! Very beautiful are some of these 
vivid momentary gleams in his pathetic verse. Take for 
one example only two lines quoted by Carlyle from the song 
Open the Door to Me, — 

The wan moon sets behind the white wave, 
And Time is setting with me, O. 

In the sheer simplicity of mournful power they are quite 
in the manner of the greatest masters. 

To these more distinctively poetic endowments we must 
add a great fund of common sense. He had the genuine 
Scottish interest in conduct, and a homely vigor of thought 
upon the concerns of life. It is almost surprising to note 
how large a part of the body of popular quotation from his 
work is made up of bits of pithy practical wisdom: 

To step aside is human; 

What's done we partly may compute, 
But know not what's resisted; 



ROBERT BURNS 259 

The heart ay's, the part ay 
That makes us right or wrang; 

O wad some power the giftie gie us, 
To see oursels as ithers see us! 

The rank is but the guinea's stamp. 
The man's the gowd for a' that. 

In this ability to put plain truths into their final literary 
expression Burns reminds us now and then of Pope; only 
Pope's truths are neat specimens of pointed and polished 
satire, while Burns' homely maxims are warmed by good 
humor and winged by imagination. 

And now if we unite all these qualities, — his power of 
simple yet most melodious verse; his quick sympathy with 
all the common joy and pain of life ; his fulness and intensity 
of nature, manifesting itself now in melting pity and tender- 
ness, now in humor ranging from bright archness to the 
wildest overflow of spirits; his vivid imagination; and his 
rugged Scottish vigor of intellect, — have we not in truth the 
endowment of a great poet? And when we remember that 
the poetry in which these powers are shown was all drawn 
from the experience of an unlettered young man among 
the humblest folk of a little Scottish parish, that it has no 
charm of culture or literary flavor, but holds us by its power 
to move those deep human feelings that belong alike to all, 
— then we shall understand why Robert Burns is not only a 
great poet, but the great popular poet. Surely no other 
English poet succeeded in writing before the age of twenty- 
seven so much verse of equal interest to the man of letters 
and the man of toil as Robert Burns had put into that little 
book he carried with him up to Edinburgh. 

I shall not dwell at length upon the remaining chapter of 
Burns' story. For it seems to me, as I have already said, 
that his career as a man was virtually decided, and his career 
as a poet almost ended before he went up to Edinburgh 
at all. 

What a sudden and brilliant triumph he had there we 
all know. Before he has been in Edinburgh a month he has 



26o AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

met most of the culture and fashion of the town. He dines 
with duchesses and he is stared at on the street. Jeffrey 
used to say he remembered that when he was a boy in his 
teens some one in a shop-door tapped him on the shoulder 
and pointed to a man on the street, — "Ay, lad, see him ! Ye 
do well to look at yon man ; that's Robbie Burns." I don't 
remember any case where literary fame has given such 
sudden social eclat. 

There was doubtless a factitious element in this popu- 
larity. Fine sentiments about the equality of man and the 
nobility of humble virtue were very fashionable just then, 
not only in Paris but in Edinburgh, and here was a poet who 
illustrated these all in his own person. Yet in the main, I 
think. Burns' welcome to Edinburgh was based on a genuine 
appreciation of his work. 

And in the main Burns bore himself very well among his 
great friends. He showed no silly vanity, he showed no em- 
barrassment or affectation, only an occasional urgency of 
manner which arose from an uneasy consciousness of social 
differences. For Burns always felt himself outside that 
circle whose hospitalities were for a time so freely proffered 
him, and saw how his popularity was likely to end. He knew 
that what called itself the best society of Edinburgh would 
hardly admit to intimate membership a young fellow from 
Ayrshire whose entire earthly possessions amounted to some 
fifty pounds, and who leaves the drawing rooms of Princes 
Street to return at night to lodgings in Baxter's Close, Lawn- 
market, hired in company with a lad from his native town at 
the price of three shillings a week. That knowledge was not 
cheering. He felt with bitterness that he was making many 
acquaintances, but few friends; and he felt with an added 
pang that these new friends belonged to a circle to which it 
seemed hopeless for him to aspire. Nothing in his new ex- 
periences, we may be sure, could have had a greater fascina- 
tion for this young man than the society of refined and ac- 
complished women, to which he had hitherto been quite a 
stranger. And yet of all those whom he met in the early 
months of his Edinburgh sojourn only one seems to have 



ROBERT BURNS 261 

proved herself a life-long friend to him. Miss Margaret 
Chalmers told the poet Campbell in after years that Burns 
had made her an offer of marriage — as he would probably 
have done to any young lady who honored him with her ac- 
quaintance for a week; Miss Chalmers declined the offer, 
wisely I suppose, but she must have done it graciously, too, 
for Burns always accounted her one of his truest friends. 
His letters to her are, I am sure, the best he ever wrote, and 
the very last song he ever penned with failing hand ten 
years later was one in which his thought went fondly back 
to that "fairest maid on Devon's banks." But one can 
imagine how some dream of a life in a society of intellect 
and culture may have made his past life look bleak and 
barren, and have deepened his aversion to a return to the 
plow. 

Yet it is doubtless idle to blame his new admirers that 
they did nothing more for him. Still more idle is it, to rail, 
as Burns himself was sometimes inclined to, at the necessary 
inequalities of society. Certainly the poet who had sung, 
as no man ever had before, the nobility of toil, the charm 
of humble life and love, should not now have forgotten 
the lessons of his verse. Had he loved the truth, had he 
loved his art, had he loved anything well enough to make 
it steadily the end of his effort and his desire, his future 
might yet have been bright. But it was too late now. He 
had abandoned himself to his impulses so long that he had 
lost the power of singleness of aim, of fixed and resolute 
effort, and could only run here and there in an idle chase 
after enjoyment. And so he wasted a year in gossiping de- 
lays, in lazy, rambling summer tours through Scotland, and 
the next winter found him still in Edinburgh waiting aim- 
lessly for something to turn up. It was during this winter 
that he had the long philandering correspondence with 
Clarinda. Mrs. McLehose was a plump, pleasant-man- 
nered, most effusive person, just the poet's age. Her hus- 
band, unfortunately for all concerned, had left her rather 
shabbily, and gone to the West Indies ; and Mrs. McLehose 
seemed to have wished him still farther away. Her feelings 



262 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

were very tender and she always had an abundant supply of 
them. She quoted The Sorrows of Werther; she wrote 
verses on the "Friendship of the Heart," which Burns — 
Heaven pardon him! — pronounced worthy of Sappho; and 
she declared that "for many years" she "had sought for 
some male friend endowed with sentiments like yours; one 
who could love me with tenderness yet unmixed with selfish- 
ness: who could be my friend, companion, protector." She 
was withal very religious, and seems to have thought to 
steady a rather yielding temperament by a very rigid doc- 
trine, though the union of the sentiment of Rousseau with 
the theology of Calvin makes a somewhat queer combina- 
tion. She appears for some weeks to have written Burns a 
kind of sermon on Sunday evenings to correct the compli- 
ances of Saturday evenings. That Mrs. McLehose fell very 
much in love with Burns, one must admit, with a kind of pity 
for her; she was always trembling on the verge of such a 
catastrophe. But I question whether the answering affec- 
tion of Burns was very deep. Surely some of Sylvander's 
letters to Clarinda are very unedifying reading indeed. For 
once this outspoken man can write mere cant and sentimental 
vaporing. I don't think Robert Burns shines in such com- 
position as this : 

For instance, suppose you and I just as we are at present, the 
same reasoning powers, sentiments, and even desires; the same fond 
curiosity for knowledge and remarking observation in our minds — 
and imagine our bodies free from pain . . . imagine further that we 
were set free from the laws of gravitation which bind us to this 
globe, and could at pleasure fly, without inconvenience, through all 
the yet unconjectured bounds of creation — what a life of bliss should 
we lead in our mutual pursuit of virtue and knowledge, and our 
mutual enjoyment of friendship and love! 

Don't you see us hand in hand, or rather my arm about your 
lovely waist, making our remarks on Sirius, the nearest of the fixed 
stars; or surveying a comet flaming innoxious by us, as we just now 
would mark the passing pomp of a travelling monarch ; or in a shady 
bower of Mercury or Venus, dedicating the hour to love and mutual 
converse, relying honour, and revelling endearment — while the most 
exalted strains of poesy and harmony would be the ready, spon- 
taneous language of our souls? 



ROBERT BURNS 263 

Burns kept up this sort of thing for some two months, but 
when in the spring, he resolved after some not very manly 
hesitation to fly — not to the nearest fixed star — but to 
Mauchline and take to himself Jean Armour to wife, as it 
was his duty to do, I don't think the parting with Clarinda 
cost him many pangs. The fact is, Burns told only truth 
when he said his heart had been aflame so many times that 
it was almost vitrified. No dissipation is so ruinous as the 
dissipation of the affections, and Burns had been throwing 
his away for years. 

But in 1788 he began his last struggle to lead a healthful 
and ordered life. He turned his back on Edinburgh. He 
married his Jean. He leased a farm at EUisland and set 
himself resolutely at work to make a home for her and his 
children. One sees, though, from such a letter as he wrote 
Peggy Chalmers, September 16, 1788 — perhaps the most 
pathetic letter he ever wrote — that it was with many a long- 
ing, backward look that Burns left the city for his farm; 
and fears that it was duty rather than affection that drew 
him to his Jean. Still, it was much to have manfully ac- 
cepted his duty; and for a little time hope brightened over 
his life. For the first time in his life he sat with wife and 
weans about his own fireside; he followed his plow on 
his own acres, and tasted for a time the joys of honest in- 
dependence. As might have been expected, when his emo- 
tions grew healthy, the poetic inspiration returned in its 
old purity and freshness. It was at EUisland he wrote Tarn 
Glen, and Auld Lang Syne, and Tarn o' Shanter, and Mary 
in Heaven, and some half a score more of his best songs. 
He said afterward it was the happiest period of his life. 
Who can help wishing that his checkered story might have 
ended here I 

But the sky darkened very soon. The season was bad, 
and the soil was poor, he said. Very likely; but it is to be 
feared there were other reasons. Habits of thrift and 
hardy resolution cannot grow up In a day. After three 
years he gave up his farm altogether and removed to Dum- 
fries. 



264 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

In this dingy and vulgar town the last act in the tragedy 
of his life passed drearily to its close. He did his work as 
an exciseman faithfully; but the promotion he hoped for did 
not come. Those were the feverish days of the French 
Revolution, and Burns was always at heart in sympathy with 
the popular cause. It was in these last days that he wrote 
that really great song which may be called the first mani- 
festo of the revolutionary spirit in English poetry, A Man's 
a Man for A' That. But his liberal sentiments did not 
recommend him for promotion. Envious people spread 
rumors that Robert Burns, with the King's commission in 
his pocket, had been drinking to "the last chapter of the last 
book of Kings." Many of his companions were of a sort 
to do him little good, and he felt himself deserted by better 
folk. One remembers Lockhart's oft-told story of the 
street full of fine ladies and gentlemen on their way to the 
Dumfries ball, who all passed by on the other side with no 
word of recognition for the fallen poet. "Nay, nay," said 
Burns to a friend who suggested that he join them, "Nay, 
nay, that's all over now"; and after a pause quoted the old 
Scotch ballad, — 

Oh were we young as we ance hae been 
We suld hae been gallopin down on yon green, 
An linkin it owre the lily-white lea — 
And werena my heart light, I wad dee. 

Now and then as the clouds that hung low about him parted 
for a moment he broke out in some note of pure and touch- 
ing song; but his habit of inspiration had fled. The bright- 
ness, the elasticity had gone out of his life. The blue sky, 
the song of birds, the scent of new mown hay in sunny fields, 
these were exchanged for the clink of glasses and the reek of 
whisky in the dirty tap room of the Globe Tavern. His 
health broke down; his genial spirits failed. He sank 
from bad to worse till the end came. He died prematurely 
old at thirty-seven. 

As we think upon him we need not forget the stern truth 
his story proves too well, that the kindest heart and the most 



ROBERT BURNS 265 

generous impulses cannot save from disaster a life that will 
not own a steady allegiance to duty. Still less need we ad- 
mit that the greatness of the poet was due to the weakness 
of the man. On the contrary, his faults as a man are pre- 
cisely the faults that shut him out from the little company 
of the very greatest poets. He lacked something of that 
moral earnestness, that calm elevation of spirit, that appre- 
ciation of the deepest truth which set a man highest among 
the immortal singers. His emotions, too, on which the lyric 
power depends, jaded by a life of irregular impulse soon 
lost something of their vernal purity; they kept the fire but 
lost the dew of youth. But while we need not forget these 
things, we may remember — nay, we must remember — how 
strait were the barriers within which fate had decreed this 
passionate nature should be confined, how long was his strug^ 
gle, and how much that was honest and noble and tender he 
kept in his life till the end. How much that was honest, I 
say, — for even when he refused to do his duty, he would 
not deny it, nor excuse himself by confusing all distinction 
of right and wrong; how much that was noble, — noble scorn 
for meanness and injustice, noble admiration for courage 
and independence and all the sturdy virtues of manhood; 
above all, how much that was tender in love for brother man 
and sister woman, in great charity for the sins and pity for 
the sorrows of our human lot. 

And it is these virtues, shown alike in his life and in his 
song, that have so endeared his verse to all who know our 
English tongue. 

No poet, I often think, has so enviable a fame as he. 
The verses dear alike to scholar and to peasant, the verses 
that speak the universal passions of the heart, and spring un- 
bidden to the lips of all men in hours of sadness and in 
moments of the wildest mirth; the verses that are part of 
the household song of a race, sung by thousands who have 
not even learned to read them : such verses as these Robert 
Burns has written. And who else has written such? Let us 
think of him gratefully; whatever his failings, he was the 
most human of poets : 



266 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Through busiest street and loneliest glen 

Are felt the flashes of his pen; 

He rules 'mid winter snows, and when 

Bees fill their hives; 
Deep in the general heart of men 

His power survives. 



JOHN RUSKIN 

THE last of the great generation of English men of 
letters who brightened the mid-nineteenth century is 
gone.^ John Ruskin is dead. He outlived all his 
eminent contemporaries in literature, — Carlyle, Arnold, 
Browning, Tennyson, — he outlived himself. For it was 
Ruskin's hard fortune to see the decline of his own influence 
and to know that the writings of his later years, on which 
he himself laid most emphasis, were received by the public 
with indifference or sometimes with derision. He finished 
his work in discouragement more than ten years ago; his 
power began to decline, and he passed the last decade of 
life in pathetic silence and seclusion, slowly forgetting a 
world that seemed already to have forgotten him. But 
it is a matter of frequent observation that a great reputa- 
tion gained during one generation is liable to temporary 
decline during the next. Public opinion and standards of 
taste slowly change ; or men become used to the novel powers 
that surprised and^ charmed at first, and their attention is 
withdrawn to new aspirants for literary honors. After a 
time, however, these smaller men drop out of notice, while 
the true proportions of the great man's work grow more 
evident; a second and juster fame is accorded him, and he 
takes his place as a classic. So will it be, we are assured, 
with Mr. Ruskin. When the twentieth century shall have 
made up its verdict on the nineteenth, he will be accounted 
not as merely a brilliant erratic genius, but as one of the 
wisest teachers of his age and a master of English unsur- 
passed in any age. 

The latter title to fame may be considered as already 
established. Even those who reject Ruskin's teachings ad- 

*This paper was published as a commemorative essay at the time of 
Ruskin's death. See Prefatory Note, p. xi. [L. B. G.] 

267 



268 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

mit the wonderful charm of his style. His only rival for the 
foremost place as master of English prose in the nineteenth 
century is Thomas Carlyle. The manner of the two men was 
indeed very different. Carlyle wrote always with tremendous 
difficulty — language, as it were, torn out of him in an agony ; 
and it seems still to bear the marks of those throes of com- 
position. His speech is rugged, irregular, setting at naught 
all the rules of the smooth rhetorician; but no more valorous, 
hard-hitting English was ever written, and some of his best 
descriptive passages in The French Revolution have a lurid, 
imaginative vividness almost preternatural — like what we 
see in dreams. Ruskin's writing departs much less widely 
in structure from conventional standards, and shows greater 
mastery of the mechanics of the rhetorical art; yet it is no 
less original than Carlyle's, and it is far more spontaneous 
and opulent. His style has all those inner qualities which 
make writing noteworthy, — continuous and brilliant imagi- 
nation, eager enthusiasm, and a rapidity of mental move- 
ment which gives to his most purely descriptive passages 
the constant play and glance of life. Then he has an under- 
current of humor, with a tinge of sarcasm, which in his later 
writings is often something more than a tinge, but which 
always gives pungency and piquancy to his style. Both 
Carlyle and Ruskin have often been charged with a lack 
of temperance; but the charge has more force against 
Carlyle than against Ruskin, and is much exaggerated in 
both cases; for temperance and chasteness are not univer- 
sally virtues of style. In the statement of facts, indeed, pre- 
cision is always the first requisite; but in the expression of 
emotion there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as precision. 
Nor is there any reason why prose writing should keep a 
pedestrian pace on the low levels of narrative and ex- 
position; the loftier attitudes of emotion are not above the 
proper path of prose. But such impassioned prose cannot 
be cool and measured in manner; and, while it will always 
avoid the formal rhythm and cadence of verse, it will in- 
evitably take on something of the charm of music and image 
which we commonly associate with poetry. 



JOHN RUSKIN 269 

Now, of this impassioned prose Ruskin was the greatest 
master in our literature. No man since Jeremy Taylor 
has known how to write an English so rich in beautiful 
imagery or with such subtle and varied rhythmical effects. 
Yet his writing never suggests that artful elaboration which 
is inconsistent with earnestness. It is no such inflated and 
grandiose product as DeQuincey's bastard prose-poetry. 
Ruskin's luxuriance is always spontaneous, and his most 
elaborate passages seem naturally conformed at every point 
to the flexure of his thought or feeling. His style, though 
profuse, is never diffuse — which is a very different thing; for 
diffuseness usually proceeds from the fact that the writer 
has but few ideas and is trying to hammer them out as 
thin as possible, while profuseness comes from the abun- 
dance of illustrative or accessory ideas that come crowding 
thickly about a central thought and press for utterance. 
Nor did Ruskin's profusion ever betray him into careless- 
ness. With all his wealth of diction, he would not throw 
away a word, — he would not use a word at random. Indeed, 
the most remarkable thing about his language is the com- 
bination of exuberance with precision. He used to insist 
on this precision of phrase as one of the surest tests of 
literary eminence,^ and his own choice of words was always 
made with the greatest nicety. Even in his most gorgeous 
passages, when he might seem to be throwing the reins upon 
the neck of his rhetoric, his phrase will be found to be ex- 
quisitely fitted to the fact or the feeling. If you try to say 
the same thing more simply you will find that your expres- 
sion is not only tame and colorless but really less accurate. 

His mastery is probably seen best in some of his descrip- 
tive passages. Description, whether in prose or verse, is 
usually a weariness. Language is ill suited to render the 
charm of color or form. But sometimes the union of imagi- 
nation and emotion with the rarest art can set before us in 
words a scene as vividly as any painter can picture it, and 
with a thrilling spiritual sense of its meaning such as no 
painter can ever give. Ruskin's work is full of such pas- 

*See, for example, Sesame and Lilies, Lecture I. 



270 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

sages. He had a minute and accurate observation, so that 
his description seems always exactly true. He had the keen- 
est feeling for beauty everywhere, and especially for its 
analogies and suggestions, — for those large spiritual truths 
of which beauty was to him the outward form and symbol; 
so that his description, even in its loftiest flights, seems never 
extravagant or labored, but only some expression of that 
emotion which, when sincere, cannot be exaggerated, since 
it is infinite in nature and therefore in its fulness ineffable. 
How shall a man exaggerate the peace of summer evenings 
or the solemnity of the star-sown midnight sky? But, beside 
all this, Ruskin had in almost unprecedented degree that 
sense of form which alone can render feeling articulate. He 
chose his words, as we have said, with the utmost nicety; 
but he knew that the meaning of words in combination is 
indefinitely varied and intensified by their movement and 
music. In fact, such prose as Ruskin's illustrates, quite as 
well as music can, all the effects of tone and rhythm and 
cadence. His page is sprinkled thick with alliteration, as- 
sonance, and all subtle adaptations of sound to sentiment; 
yet the whole is wrought so spontaneously and is so brought 
into subservience to the dominant emotion that all these de- 
tailed felicities of art are lost in the total impression. The 
limits of this paper will not permit extended quotation, but 
we may be allowed a single passage. It will show the deli- 
cacy of Ruskin's art all the better that it is not one of his 
purple patches, but is descriptive of the most unobtrusive 
forms of vegetable life, — mosses and lichens. Yet what 
microscopic nicety of observation and felicity of epithet are 
found in the quotation, what fine sense of emotional values, 
and what a solemn grace of movement, — especially in the 
last paragraph, where the soft, open vowels and the slow- 
paced liquids and sibilants keep step with the gentle pathos 
of the thought and then die gradually away in the lingering 
cadence of the closing lines : 

Meek creatures! the first mercy of the earth, veiling with hushed 
softness its dintless rocks ; creatures full of pity, covering with strange 
and tender honour the scarred disgrace of ruin, — laying quiet finger 



JOHN RUSKIN 271 

on the trembling stones to teach them rest. No words that I know 
of will say what these mosses are. None are delicate enough, none 
perfect enough, none rich enough. How is one to tell of the 
rounded bosses of furred and beaming green, — the starred divisions 
of rubied bloom, fine-filmed, as if the Rock-Spirits could spin porphyr^'^ 
as we do glass, — the traceries of intricate silver, and fringes of 
amber, lustrous, arborescent, burnished through every fiber into 
fitful brightness and glossy traverses of silken change, yet all subdued 
and pensive, and framed for simplest, sweetest offices of grace. They 
will not be gathered, like the flowers, for chaplet or love-token ; but 
of these the wild bird will make its nest, and the wearied child his 
pillow. 

And, as the earth's first mercy, so they are its last gift to us. When 
all other service is vain, from plant and tree, the soft mosses and gray 
lichen take up their watch by the head-stone. The woods, the blos- 
soms, the gift-bearing grasses, have done their part for a time, but 
these do service for ever. Trees for the builder's yard, flowers for 
the bride's chamber, corn for the granary, moss for the grave. 

Yet as in one sense the humblest, in another they are the most 
honored of the earth-children. Unfading as motionless, the worm 
frets them not, and the autumn wastes not. Strong in lowliness, 
they neither blanch in heat nor pine in frost. To them, slow- 
fingered, constant-hearted, is entrusted the weaving of the dark, 
eternal tapestries of the hills; to them, slow-pencilled, iris-dyed, the 
tender framing of their endless imagery. Sharing the stillness of the 
unimpassioned rock, they share also its endurance; and while the 
winds of departing spring scatter the white hawthorn blossom like 
drifted snow, and summer dims on the parched meadow the drooping 
of its cowslip-gold, — far above, among the mountains, the silver 
lichen-spots rest, starlike, on the stone; and the gathering orange 
stain upon the edge of yonder western peak reflects the sunsets of a 
thousand years. '^ 

Ruskin's manner changed, about i860, with his change 
of subject. It grew more simple, direct, and, in his latest 
writings, colloquial. To the last, indeed, he retained his 
power of lavishly beautiful description, as passages in the 
Prceterita will show ; but he was used to speak disparagingly 
of that kind of writing, and seemed vexed that the public 
should any longer care for it while they refused to listen to 
weightier matters. When he revised the second volume of 
Modern Painters, in 1882, he ruthlessly cut away all the de- 

' Modern Painters, Vol. V, Part VI, Chap. X. 



272 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

scrlptive portions of the book, leaving only that part which 
contained his theory of beauty. But if in his later style there 
is less luxuriance of imagery, there is the same glow of feel- 
ing, the same charm of movement and music. The Unto this 
Last (1862), which marks the turning point in his career, is 
a treatise on economics, compact, closely reasoned, without a 
line of mere rhetoric, and yet filled with restrained energy 
and moving with a noble rhythm that recalls the best pas- 
sages of Scripture. The Crown of Wild Olive, four years 
later, — which Ruskin himself was inclined to call his best 
book, — while it is chaste in manner, is one of the best speci- 
mens of genuine eloquence, that is, of impassioned appeal, 
in nineteenth century literature. It may be admitted that, 
at least in his later years, his zeal often became intemperate. 
The preacher got the better of the artist, and his style lost 
the balance and self-possession that mark work we call 
classic. To him the world verily seemed slipping into con- 
tented or scornful forgetfulness of the things that make for 
righteousness and peace; and he may well be forgiven if 
his voice sometimes rose into despairing remonstrance or 
denunciation. But it never rings hollow. Even in the most 
extravagant passages of the Fors Clavigera we never catch 
the note of rhetorical resonance. His opinions may be 
wrong; his fears may be groundless; his condemnation may 
be unjust: but he is as sincere as Jeremiah. Such intense 
moral earnestness, joined with such supreme command of 
the literary art, would suffice to keep alive the writing of 
any man, even if the ideas underneath it were fundamentally 
mistaken — witness the case of Shelley. But the leading 
ideas of Ruskin are not mistakes. In reality he has been 
one of the great teachers of the last generation. 

Up to i860 all of Ruskin's writing was concerned more 
or less directly with the two arts of painting and architec- 
ture. It is the period of the Modern Painters (1843- 
1860), The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and The 
Stones of Venice ( 185 i- 18 53). These three books awak- 
ened general interest in the art of northern Italy, so that for 
half a century past the English-speaking traveler has been 



JOHN RUSKIN 273 

trying — often, it must be confessed, with grievous effort — 
to see things through Ruskin's spectacles. He did more 
than any other one man to secure sincere and intelligent ad- 
miration for several early Italian painters hardly known in 
England before, — Giotto, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Car- 
paccio. Yet the permanent value of these books as contri- 
butions to either the theory, the history, or the criticism of 
art is doubtful. The first was undertaken in defense 
of Turner, the other two in defense of a theory; and all 
three were written in the temper of the advocate rather than 
in the temper of the student. Ruskin is never dispassionate. 
His youthful enthusiasm is captivating, but his opinions are 
sometimes of the high a priori sort, and depend for their 
proof mostly on a splendid confidence of statement. He is 
prone to large generalization on the basis of his own tastes, 
and sometimes mistakes a poetic fancy for an eternal truth. 
In particular, his disposition to measure art by moral stand- 
ards — on which, to be sure, the value of all his work largely 
depends — often warps his judgment; and even those of us 
most in sympathy with his principles must admit that his 
ethics and aesthetics now and then get oddly mixed. More- 
over, his appreciation is limited; there are fields of art — 
Greek art, for example — for which he has very inadequate 
feeling. Painters and architects will tell you that he is ro- 
mantic, capricious, antiquarian; that he gives them little aid 
in adapting a vital and progressive art to the needs of 
to-day. 

All this is doubtless true. But Ruskin was not a painter 
or an architect; he was not, we think, primarily a critic of 
those arts. He was a man of letters. His writing, like all 
literature, was addressed not to the trained intellect of a 
class, but to the larger interests of men. It will be measured 
not by its technical accuracy, but by the volume of perennial 
truth and emotion it embodies. Now the great service of 
Ruskin to the world in these early volumes may be summed 
up in the statement that he taught us, more impressively 
than any other writer of the generation, the spiritual value 
of material things. There are three ways, and only three, 



274 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

in which we may regard any outward thing — say, a tree: 
first, the practical or material way, as so much timber, or 
fuel, or fruit; second, the intellectual or scientific way, as 
an organism with laws of structure and growth to be 
studied; third, the ethical or moral way, as an immediate 
cause of joy, a thing of beauty. The third, of course, is 
Ruskin's way. It was the work of a great part of his life 
to show that this point of view is as natural as either of the 
other two, and far more important. For all material uses 
are only means. What we call useful things seem merely 
to prolong life; but what is life itself for? Beauty, on the 
other hand, is an end in itself. The highest and most essen- 
tial office, therefore, of all material things is to minister to 
our sense of beauty; that is what they are for. The end 
of the tree is not its seed, which can only reproduce its life 
or prolong ours, but its flower and its leaf. Yet it is not 
easy to persuade men of this. In truth, most of us cannot 
habitually think so. Beauty for us is a pleasing accident, 
the ornament or life, but no part of its object. The outer 
world, we say, is stuff for use, to be wrought into food, or 
raiment, or shelter. Perhaps the constant struggle for ex- 
istence makes it inevitable that this should be our mode of 
thought, and more inevitable as the struggle grows more 
desperate; so, at all events, it is. We purchase what we 
call convenience and utility with hardly a thought of their 
cost in beauty. Our traffic and manufactures may excoriate 
the landscape, blacken the skies, and pollute the streams; 
but if any man protest we brand him as a sentimentalist. 
Nor is it only the ruder mass of men that hold beauty cheap 
in any computation of the goods of life. Men of science 
engaged in study of the laws of nature, men who would 
scorn to estimate things by gross material values, have a 
superior disregard for what they deem mere aesthetics. 
Truth, they say, — meaning by truth facts of relation and 
succession among phenomena, — is higher than beauty; for- 
getting that one class of phenomena, as truly facts of ob- 
servation as any other, has a unique power upon our spir- 
itual nature which puts them above other facts. "Beauty 



JOHN RUSKIN 275 

is truth," as Keats said, and it is a higher than scientific 
truth. It was the work of Ruskin not only to protest with 
impassioned eloquence against the perversion of view which 
ranks the means above the ends of life, but so to open the 
eyes and touch the hearts of men that they might estimate 
at its true worth the beauty of the world. 

This he did partly by the marvelous vividness and 
fidelity of his descriptions, of which we have already spoken. 
The Modern Painters was designed to prove the truth of 
Turner's painting, and to this end Ruskin was led to the 
careful study of all those natural forms which Turner had 
depicted. This determined his method. Nature, of course, 
is the frequent theme of modern poetry; but the poets do 
not describe. They rather suggest, without detail, some 
aspects of the object in which its emotional power resides. 
The characteristic of Ruskin's writing, on the other hand, 
is the union of intense emotions with minute descriptive 
detail. He feels like a poet; he observes like a naturalist. 
And this minute observation ranges over almost the whole 
vast spectacle of nature, from the tumult of storm about 
the white summits of the Alps to the veinings of a leaf in 
the wayside hedge. We do not know which to admire the 
more, the somber majesty of such a picture as that of the 
mountains piled above Martigny,^ or the delicate grace of 
the soldanella - in Swiss meadows breaking through the 
melting snows of May. No other book records so many 
visible phenomena of beauty or grandeur — the clouds and 
the sky; the sternness of mountain and the softness of val- 
ley; waters as they hurry or linger in rivers, and as they 
toss in the waves of the sea ; the lone pine tree on the Alpine 
crag visited only by the winds and stars, and the gadding 
vine wreathed above the lowland peasant's door — all shown 
us with a beauty and a precision unfelt before. 

But the deepest power of all Ruskin's writing on nature 
or on art proceeds from his feeling of the significance of 
beauty. Beauty, as Ruskin conceives it, is an appeal not 

^Modern Painters, Part V, Chap. XIX. 
'Ibid., Part III, Chap. XII. 



276 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

to our sensuous, or our intellectual, but to our moral, nature. 
An object is beautiful not because it gives us certain sense- 
impressions of form and color, — which are presumably the 
same in the lower animals as in us, — or because of pleasur- 
able experiences personal or inherited which are bound up 
with it, but because it directly suggests ultimate moral quali- 
ties to be found in perfection only in divine nature. Beauty 
thus becomes a typical language, of which the symbols are 
sense-impressions, but the meaning is read off by our moral 
perceptions. The first half of the second volume of the 
Modern Painters — the only volume thought by Ruskin 
worthy of preservation — is devoted to an extended exposi- 
tion of this theory. A summary statement of it, in the com- 
pass of a single sentence, may be cited from the Stones of 
Venice: "I have long believed that in whatever has been 
made by the Deity externally delightful to the human sense 
of beauty there is some type of God's nature or of God's 
laws." Certain combinations of form and color, for ex, 
ample, are beautiful because they suggest Infinity, or the 
divine incomprehensibility, — as the line of a high horizon 
defined against a bare sky, "the level twilight behind purple 
hills, or the scarlet edge of dawn over the dark sea," or 
any effects of calm, luminous distance. Other material 
forms suggest repose, or the divine permanence; still others, 
symmetry, or the divine justice. Doubtless this theory 
would not be accepted by any modern psychologist as a sci- 
entific explanation of the genesis and nature of our sense of 
beauty. It explains the earlier notion by the later, the 
simpler by the more complex. Yet our feeling of an analogy 
between material and moral qualities, on which the theory 
is based, is matter of universal experience and imbedded in 
our common forms of speech. The emotions we feel in 
the presence of a beautiful object seem always largely moral, 
and in our endeavor to express such emotion by describing 
its cause we instinctively apply to the object not sensuous but 
moral epithets; we call it not red, or gray, or long, or 
rounded, but quiet, peaceful, gracious, gentle. And the 
more profound or intense that complex emotion which we 



JOHN RUSKIN 277 

call the sense of beauty, the more largely will it be found 
to be made up of moral elements. 

But whatever the philosophic value of such a theory as 
this, it is evident that to a man like Ruskin, of deep religious 
sensibilities, prone to see in all the powers and aptitudes 
of our nature proof of a divine purpose, it would give a 
peculiar intensity and seriousness to the charm of the ex- 
ternal world. To him beauty is not merely a delightful 
but a holy thing, — a revelation of the nature of the Infinite, 
gracious as his love, awful as his law. This is the secret of 
the strange power of much of his writing. It is suffused 
with an emotion hardly found before in English prose. 
Beauty had, indeed, often reminded pious writers of the 
divine benevolence, but only because, like our appetites, it 
ministers to our physical pleasure; there is no thought of 
its apocalyptic character. But it is impossible to read pas- 
sages like that quoted above without realizing that the 
beauty of the world means something more than the mere 
sensuous thrill which flatters eye or ear. 

But it is not merely in Ruskin's passages of natural de- 
scription that this conviction of the moral import of beauty 
is felt; it is this which gives such high ethical value to all his 
writing upon art. Art may be briefly defined as the attempt 
of the artist to reproduce in another the emotion he himself 
has felt in the presence of beauty. If he be painter or 
sculptor, he gives permanence to combinations of form and 
color that are transient, and so immortalizes the vision of 
his best moments. If he be man of letters, unable to repro- 
duce in language sensible beauty save only in imperfect way 
through memory and imagination, he will endeavor to re- 
produce the suggestions of the object and to interpret its 
spiritual meanings. But in either case the value of the 
product will, in the last analysis, be measured by the rank 
and intensity of the moral emotions it awakens. To this 
ethical standard Ruskin brings every work of art. He had 
no patience with the modern cry of "art for art's sake," 
He cared little — perhaps too little — for mere technique. 
He rails at the waste of time and skill over marvelous effects 



278 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

of light on a bunch of carrots or the inside of a brass kettle; 
he did not hesitate to arraign the most vaunted specimens 
of Italian art for their lack of truth in imagination and 
sincerity of feeling. Perhaps he carried this method of 
judgment too far; perhaps his opinions were sometimes 
fantastic and his verdicts perverse, though we, for one, con- 
fess to a delight in his strictures even of the "kicking grace- 
fulness" of Raphael's "Transfiguration"; but it is certain 
that this constant insistence on ethical standards gives a 
value to his work that more narrowly critical writing could 
never have. 

It is not easy, indeed, to overestimate the services of 
Ruskin to the development of English art. He began to 
write at a time when it is hardly too much to say that there 
was no English art. All the best English painters since 
his day, — Hunt, Millais, Leighton, Rossetti, Burne Jones, — 
though in no strict sense his disciples, and often differing 
with him violently, nevertheless have owed their inspiration 
largely to the romantic feeling, the fertility of suggestion, 
and the nobility of ideal in the writing of Ruskin. He did 
not found a school, but he did more than any one else to start 
a movement. The history of English art for the last half 
of the nineteenth century without mention of John Ruskin 
would be the play of Hamlet with Hamlet left out. Not 
less potent has been his influence in a general quickening of 
the popular artistic sense. When the first volume of 
Modern Painters appeared, public taste in England was at 
its nadir. It was the era of ugliness in architecture, in 
household decorations, in all the surroundings of daily life. 
We are still a great way from that simplicity and elegance 
which a true ideal of beauty in the arts of household use 
demands, but we have made a great advance since 1850. 

But the chief value of Ruskin's writing throughout this 
period of his life — as, indeed, through all his life — is 
ethical. Like all great literature, it is concerned with those 
broad truths of human nature on which the laws both of 
art and of morals are based. Thus, whatever his theme, 
before he is through with it he is sure to turn out a moralist. 



JOHN RUSKIN 279 

Nothing he has done is of more importance than this con- 
stant emphasis of the relation between conduct and artistic 
feeling, and the consequent duty of cultivating good taste. 
To many worthy, pious folk, especially In the evangelical 
section of society, with which Ruskin by birth and education 
was most closely connected, this must have seemed a fan- 
tastic and dangerous doctrine. Material beauty In any of 
its forms was most naturally deemed by them a snare, and 
overmuch admiration of It a proof of worldllness, a pam- 
pering of the carnal man. And It Is common for all of us 
to speak slightingly of "matters of taste" as having nothing 
to do with moral choice. Nor is this tendency without 
some reason. In fact, any over-ardency of admiration for 
sensible loveliness unaccompanied by a feeling for its spir- 
itual meanings does easily pass into sentlmentalism or ani- 
malism; even in the finest natures, like that of Keats, for 
Instance, it Is justly thought an indication of some lack of 
moral symmetry; while as for taste, the raptures of the 
aesthetes, for a little while In the seventies, over their bal- 
lades and blue china provoked the ridicule of all sensible 
people, and were fitly laughed away In Patience. But these 
perversities or follies are not to be charged against the 
teaching of Ruskin. If taste be merely the caprice of per- 
sonal choice between trivial things — a nice judgment In bric- 
a-brac — then, Indeed, It Is no matter to make a gospel of. 
But if, on the contrary, taste be a wise choice among the 
pleasures of life, the ability to perceive and enjoy what was 
divinely Intended for our enjoyment, then the difference be- 
tween good taste and bad taste goes to the very roots of our 
nature. And It does. Ruskin Is quite right when he says, 
"The first, last, and closest trial question to any living crea- 
ture is, 'What do you like?' Tell me what you like, and 
I'll tell you what you are." It is not so much what a man 
does that reveals his character — his doing may be deter- 
mined by convention or constraint; nor yet what he believes 
— his belief may be mostly matter of accident or Inherit- 
ance; it Is what he enjoys. This decides his Ideals and his 
desires. What, then, can be more clearly a duty than to re- 



28o AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

fine and elevate the tastes of men, to teach them to love 
the beauty God made to be loved? And if that be, as Rus- 
kin insists, always somehow the type and suggestion of in- 
finite virtue, the love of it will surely cleanse our affections 
and lift our thoughts. Nay, it will always be true that any 
perfect vision of it is possible only to the pure in heart who 
see God: 

You may answer or think, "Is the liking for outside ornaments, — 
for pictures, or statues, or furniture, or architecture, a moral qual- 
ity?" Yes, most surely, if a rightly set liking. Taste for any pic- 
tures or statues is not a moral quality, but taste for good ones is. . . . 
That is an entirely moral quality — it is the taste of the angeh. And 
all delight in fine art, and all love of it, resolve themselves into 
simple love of that which deserves love. That deserving is the 
quality we call loveliness — (we ought to have an opposite word, 
"hateliness," to be said of the things which deserve to be hated) ; 
and it is not an indifferent nor optional thing whether we love this 
or that; but it is just the vital function of all our being. What we 
like determines what we are, and is the sign of what we are; and to 
teach taste is inevitably to form character. 

It is this deep sense of ethical values that gives to all 
Ruskin's writing on art at once its breadth of interest and 
its impassioned earnestness. No other modern English 
preacher of righteousness is half so eloquent, or has half 
his power to arouse and inspire. He brings to the discus- 
sion of the most technical subjects a keen analysis of moral 
motive, a freshness of thought on the highest concerns of 
life, and an ardor of aspiration after whatsoever things are 
lovely and of good report, such as will be sought in vain in 
any other literary prose of the nineteenth century. And it 
was because he came to believe with ever-deepening convic- 
tion that the social and economic conditions of England were 
making it impossible any longer for the great majority of 
men to have any enjoyment in their work or any share in 
the real goods of life that, at the summit of his career, he 
turned away from art, gave up his fame and fortune, put by 
his plans, exchanged admiration for obloquy, and for the 
space of twenty years ceased not to exhort, to warn, to de- 



JOHN RUSKIN 281 

nouhce, till he deemed his mission hopeless and sank into 
the long, mute twilight that preceded his death. 

Had Ruskin died early in i860 he would be remembered 
to-day as the greatest master of English prose in the cen- 
tury, any extravagances quite forgotten in the breadth of 
his knowledge and the marvelous beauty of his style. But 
in that year ^ appeared in the Cornhill Magazine the Unto 
This Last: Four Essays on the First Principles of Political 
Economy, followed in the next decade by a series of books 
and addresses attacking in very outspoken fashion accepted 
economic theory and social practice based on it. Originality 
and boldness had been all very well in the criticism of art; 
to carry them into the field of practical business — that was 
a different matter. The man who had just succeeded in 
winning the applause of the British public now found him- 
self decried as a visionary whose benevolent but mischievous 
fanaticism would undermine the foundations of society. His 
enthusiasm for what seemed sweeping social heresies was 
accounted proof of radical unsoundness of judgment; and 
some of his former admirers began to doubt the wisdom 
even of his earlier work. To this day he is thought of by 
many people as an aesthetic sentimentalist who wrote some 
very beautiful things, but who in his late years worked him- 
self into a state of mind because steam-engines make a hid- 
eous noise and factories litter the landscape with their refuse 
or darken the sky with their smoke. 

But aesthetic sentimentalism does not inspire such self- 
forgetful effort as filled the last years of Ruskin's active life; 
nor can aesthetic sentimentalism teach such profound and 
impassioned truths of the relation of man to his fellows and 
his God as fill the pages of Ruskin's later books. And, 
whatever their lack of philosophic system, their occasional 
false emphasis or visionary suggestion, these books contain 
a message which the next age will have to heed — nay, which 
the present age is already beginning to heed. Whoever in 

* The two Manchester lectures on the "Political Economy of Art" — 
afterward reprinted under the title, A Joy Fore'ver — were first published in 
1857; but they rather presage Ruskin's econonnic opinions than give a sys- 
tematic statement of them. 



282 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

1950 looks over the literature of a century will see that Unto 
This Last, like Carlyie's Sartor Resartus, is one of the books 
that mark an era, for it announced the rise of a new social 
spirit. It was not love of art that wrote these later books, 
it was love of man. It was, indeed, Ruskin's study of art 
that led directly to his attack upon social conditions. The 
result of all that study had been to teach him that a great 
art is possible only in a healthy society; that the condition 
of national taste depends largely on the condition of na- 
tional morals, — The Stones of Venice had been written ex- 
pressly to prove these propositions. The converse, then, 
must be true. There must be something radically wrong 
in a state of society which made great art impossible, in 
an economic and social system that degraded the tastes of 
men at once by shutting them off from many of the best 
pleasures of life and by making them blind to the few that 
were left. And this, Ruskin thought, was just what was 
doing in the England of his day. His grief and indignation 
over some of the more remote and indirect results of the 
industrial system were not, as is so often charged, proofs 
of an idle sentimentalism. If beauty be of real moral value, 
it could not be a matter of merely sentimental regret that 
the fairest region in England was ravaged of beauty in sky 
and stream and earth till it became familiarly known as the 
"Black Country." Still less could it be a matter of indif- 
ference that half the people of England were huddled 
in the squalor and ugliness of large towns. Or, again, con- 
sider Ruskin's much-derided protests against machinery. 
One of the chief joys of all men ought certainly to be in 
their work, the joy in what they make or do; art, in fact, 
is the result of that motive in its purest form — something 
made solely for the delight of making, without thought of 
future. If a man take no joy in his work, either in the 
process itself or in his foresight of the finished product, 
then his work, no matter how high his wage, is drudgery. 
Some such drudgery doubtless there must be; but the man 
all of whose work is of that sort is a slave. Now to such 
slavery, Ruskin asserted, the perfection of machinery and 



JOHN RUSKIN 283 

consequent minute subdivision of labor had reduced vast 
numbers of English workmen. The grievance is not so 
much that the workman is poorly paid, fed, or housed, — 
although all that is too often true, — it is that he cannot pos- 
sibly find pleasure in his work. He makes nothing. He 
stands all day before a machine almost as intelligent as him- 
self, and repeats endlessly a few muscular movements, pulls 
a lever or pushes a bar. This is his "work." It is insane 
to say that any intelligent creature can take joy of it. The 
man inevitably comes to think of his pleasure, therefore, 
as something apart from his work, incompatible with work; 
and this, in four cases out of five, means moral death. We 
have become so familiar with this tendency in the last forty 
years, and with its influence on our operative class, that we 
regard it with unconcern, as part of the necessary hardship 
of life. But surely it is not sentimentality to feel the pity 
of it. Said an eminent American ecclesiastic in a public ad- 
dress the other day, after describing the work he saw a 
young man doing in a factory: "No wonder that at night- 
time he drank, gambled, and fought. He had to; other- 
wise he would go mad. How many of us would stand this 
and not cry out? Not one of us but would become a striker, 
myself among the first!" We may not agree with Ruskin 
that we had best give up most of our machines and go back 
to hand labor; the remedy must probably lie in quite another 
direction. But we need not brand as fanaticism that pas- 
sionate humanitarianism which demanded some change in 
an industry that made "goods" only by unmaking men, and 
increased what it called value only at cost of all the real 
wealth of life. 

Ruskin's real attack was directed not against any 
such incidental or secondary results of the modern industrial 
system, but against the set of economic principles which by 
common consent were supposed to govern most of the rela- 
tions of men. Political economy is usually defined as the 
science of wealth; and by wealth is meant the sum of ma- 
terial things having exchangeable value. Political economy, 
then, is the science of the acquisition and exchange of ma- 



284 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

terial things — a purely commercial science. Moreover, it 
proceeds on certain assumptions, dignified by the name of 
"laws," which exclude moral considerations altogether. It 
assumes that, if I am buying, I shall buy as cheaply as I 
can, whether labor or product; that, if I am selling either 
labor, or product, I shall sell as dearly as I can, — the sole 
motive in either case, being gain in material things. That is, 
it is the scientific expression of some forms of human selfish- 
ness. There may be no objection to such a science as this, 
if it keep within its own sphere and be recognized as merely 
what it is, a body of practical laws derived from assumed 
principles. If we do so and so, such and such things will 
follow; which reasoning leaves it quite an open question 
whether we ought to do so and so. If we assume that two 
and two make five, we can logically go on to conclude that 
four and four make ten; but the body of laws derived from 
our first assumption will hardly fit the computations of real 
life. Yet, in practice, it seems to be taken for granted that 
the most important dealings of men with each other in or- 
ganized society — not only the acquisition of wealth, but, 
secondarily, the social conditions and opportunities largely 
determined by wealth — must all be governed by this science 
of political economy. The only motive supposed to be oper- 
ative is the self-interest of the individual; whatever hardship 
or inequality may result, no obstacle must be placed in the 
way of that. Government exists chiefly to secure to every 
man his liberty and his rights; that is, to see that he Is let 
alone and allowed to make the most of all his powers in the 
struggle for existence. We may not by superior strength 
strangle our neighbor, out of hate for him; but we may by 
superior shrewdness starve him, out of love for ourselves. 

Now, against this hard economic theory Ruskin urged 
three principal objections. First, and foremost, he pro- 
tested in the name of humanity and religion against this 
stolid enthronement of the "Goddess of Getting-on" as the 
only possible ruler over a large part of human action. No 
science can pretend to govern the actions of Christian men 
which is not a moral science; yet this so-called political 



JOHN RUSKIN 285 

economy takes It for granted that three fourths of human 
conduct is not to be measured by moral standards. It makes 
the law of supply and demand the sole nexus between social 
beings, and practically excludes ethical motives from eco- 
nomic discussion. The pretended laws of such a science, 
Ruskin asserts, are not laws at all, nor must they be accepted 
as rules of conduct. We shall buy in the cheapest market? 
That depends on what makes the market cheap. We are at 
liberty to invest our capital where it will bring the highest 
rates of interest? No ; not if such investment means to con- 
demn many people to work on the lowest living wage, while 
we sit still and enjoy the fruit of their labor; to condemn 
them, moreover, to work that is cheerless, carried on in de- 
basing conditions, and resulting in product often excessive 
and sometimes really valueless. We must be allowed free 
competition? Certainly not, if free competition means that 
we are permitted by our superior shrewdness to shut up 
every avenue of advance to our rivals and crush all weaker 
competitors. Cries Ruskin : 

You would be indignant if you saw a strong man walk into a 
theater or lecture room and, calmly choosing the best place, take his 
feeble neighbor by the shoulder, and turn him out of it into the back 
seats, or the street. You would be equally indignant if you saw a 
stout fellow thrust himself up to a table where some hungry children 
were being fed, and reach his arm over their heads and take their 
bread from them. But you are not the least indignant if, when a 
man has stoutness of thought and swiftness of capacity, and, instead of 
being long-armed only, has the much greater gift of being long-headed 
— you think it perfectly just that he should use his intellect to take the 
bread out of the mouths of all the other men in the town who are 
of the same trade with him ; or use his breadth and sweep of sight to 
gather some branch of the commerce of the country into one great 
cobweb, of which he is himself to be the central spider, making every 
thread vibrate with the points of his claws, and commanding every 
avenue with the facets of his eyes. You see no injustice in this.^ 

Not that Ruskin contemplated any such thing as eco- 
nomic equality among men. He never advocated any level- 
ing scheme to prevent the accumulation of wealth in the 

*A Joy Forever, § 117. 



286 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

hands of individuals. There must always be the rich and 
the poor. In so far as these inequalities result from dif- 
ferences in industry, economy, — in a word, from moral dif- 
ferences, — they are wholesome examples of moral law; they 
would exist in an ideal state. In so far as they result from 
differences of native ability or unavoidable circumstance, 
they are misfortunes to be minimized as far as possible; in 
an ideal state they would no longer exist. In so far as they 
result from any form of the tyranny of the strong over the 
weak, they are evidence of virtual robbery, and in the actual 
state ought not to be countenanced. But, under our present 
economic system, Ruskin contends, differences of fortune are 
no index of character : 

In a community regulated only by laws of demand and supply, 
hut protected from open violence, the persons who become rich are, 
generally speaking, industrious, resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, 
methodical, sensible, unimaginative, insensitive, and ignorant. The 
persons who remain poor are the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, 
the idle, the reckless, the humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the 
imaginative, the sensitive, the well-informed, the improvident, the 
irregularly and impulsively wicked, the clumsy knave, the open thief, 
and the entirely merciful, just and godly person.^ 

Which statement affords food for reflection. 

The entire lack of relation between wealth and moral 
character indicated in this passage may suggest the second of 
Ruskin's objections to the economic theory of his day. He 
would broaden the range of economic discussion by giving 
a more adequate definition of the word "wealth." Rightly 
considered, wealth is the sum of those things that maintain 
or enlarge life, intellectual and moral, as well as physical. 
But most economic discussion not only proceeds upon the 
assumption of selfish motive, but it leaves out altogether the 
more worthy objects of effort. Its values are exclusively 
material, and even of material things it considers only those 
that can be individually appropriated and exchanged. The 
real economic value of anything should be estimated by a 
comparison of its power to maintain life with its cost in life. 

Unto this Last, Essay IV. 



JOHN RUSKIN 287 

It follows that we cannot safely discuss the laws of increase 
in material value apart from all other considerations. The 
statement that a man may gain the whole world and lose 
his own soul is not a piece of pietism, but a sober economic 
truth to be reckoned with — for that operation is not one of 
profit. A wider political economy must ask. how best to 
attain, preserve, and distribute among men all the real goods 
of life. It will be, therefore, not merely a material but an 
ethical science; or, rather, it will be, as Ruskin has called 
it, "a system of conduct and legislation." 

This last word suggests Ruskin's third criticism. Cur- 
rent economic theory was, he held, virtually anti-social. It 
left everything in the power of the individual. It not only 
allowed all sorts of injustice that spring from superior per- 
sonal ability, but it encouraged a false spirit of liberty, and 
weakened the temper of obedience upon which the stability 
of society largely depends. Ruskin was no democrat. He 
was in favor of more government rather than less. The 
function of government, he held, is not limited to the pro- 
tection of the individual from actual violence. If the State 
may call upon every man to defend the general wealth, even 
at the cost of life itself, then it must do all in its power to 
secure to every man his share in the general wealth. In a 
word, it is bound to do for the individual everything it pos- 
sibly can do. 

These three objections, variously enforced and illus- 
trated throughout his later writings, are at the bottom of 
all Ruskin's arraignment of society. And will most men 
deny that all three are well taken? We may take offense 
at occasional extravagance in asserting them; we shall cer- 
tainly dissent from some inferences he drew from them. 
No one thinks we must travel by stagecoach and sailing 
vessel again, or relinquish in any wise our command of 
material energy and product. Probably no one thinks all 
taking of interest on capital is immoral. These are vagaries 
of Ruskin's, prompted by an enthusiastic devotion to his 
principles, but not logically implied in them. Moreover, it 
may be admitted that the form in which his teaching is put 



288 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

is now and then over- fanciful. We should hardly look to 
find economic truths in the behavior of crystals or in the 
songs of Shakespeare's Tempest. A wide-ranging imagina- 
tion, over-possessed by a fervid purpose, discovers anal- 
ogies in most unlooked-for places. But the core of 
Ruskin's doctrine was sound. It was an earnest attempt to 
apply the morality of the New Testament to all the business 
of men. Christian men should not object to that. And if 
Ruskin's denunciation was sometimes severe, was it not 
needed? Is it not needed even now? What are the dangers 
that most threaten us in America to-day — the aggregation 
of wealth in a few hands ; the corrupt influence of great 
moneyed interests upon legislation; the resistless tyranny of 
trusts and combinations; the degradation of great masses 
of our lowest laborers in factories and mines; the disrespect 
for law; the insolence of our youth; the general lack of the 
spirit of obedience in our civilization — what are all these 
but precisely the threatening dangers pointed out by Ruskin 
half a century ago? And, on the other hand, we 
may thankfully note that in many ways Ruskin's teaching 
has already begun to bear fruit. The hard pedantry of the 
Manchester school of economics, supreme then, is now 
generally discredited. We are finding that government 
has some other functions than to see that everybody is let 
alone. State and city have already begun to look after the 
health, moral and Intellectual, as well as physical, of all 
their citizens; to remove enterprises affecting the common 
welfare out of the control of private greed; to interfere 
with the liberty of the individual, in behalf of the general 
interest, in a score of ways undreamed of when Ruskin wrote. 
Most of all, a new and broader social sentiment is surely 
pervading modern thought. It is no longer deemed possible 
that "an advantageous code of social action may be deter- 
mined irrespective of the influence of social affections." 
That once-dreaded word "Socialism," though still used to 
cover a multitude of follies, is no longer a red rag to 
frighten all conservative folk. The favorite study of the 
scholar and the statesman is social science, and social science 



JOHN RUSKIN 289 

is only the attempt to throw a bridge between Christian 
ethics and political economy. The best thought of the 
world to-day is being put upon that problem. For all this 
we are largely to thank John Ruskin. He was no statesman, 
no philosopher; he was a man of letters. But the man of 
letters often prepares the way for the philosopher and 
statesman. Behind every great movement is a great volume 
of sentiment. In this case it was Ruskin who embodied this 
social sentiment in literature. 

But Ruskin was not content to serve the cause of hu- 
manity merely by sitting in a library and writing books. 
He lived the life of a missionary — teaching, lecturing, ex- 
horting; founding schools, museums, libraries; giving with- 
out stint of his money, his time, his treasures of art; writing 
multitudes of private letters of advice; giving counsel and 
encouragement to all who sought it; filled with sympathy 
for all hardship, with indignation for all injustice; burning 
with zeal to secure for everybody some share in the real 
goods of life. In the early fifties he was among the first 
of a little band of social reformers to set on foot a scheme 
of education for English artisans and establish the Work- 
ing Men's College, of which F. D. Maurice was president, 
and with which Charles Kingsley, Tom Hughes, and Dante 
Gabriel Rossetti were connected. Miss Octavia Hill always 
found him her most generous helper in her work of intel- 
ligent assistance for the honest poor of East London, He 
was left by his father a fortune of over £160,000, — nearly 
a million dollars, — but he spent the whole of it in charitable 
uses. Some of his social experiments seemed quixotic, 
others trivial; but he knew that, as Burke said, if you want 
to get anywhere you must start from where you are. If he 
set some Oxford students at making a road, it was probably 
because he thought it well those young fellows should find 
out what manual labor is like rather than because he sup- 
posed they would make a very good road. His much- 
derided Guild of St. George was simply a voluntary associa- 
tion of people willing to help him, whenever opportunity of- 
fered, in putting some of his notions into practice. The 



290 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

only pledge of the Guild is a simple but noble resolve which 
any Christian man or woman ought to be ready to make. 
But, however visionary some of Ruskin's plans, we can find 
inspiration in the example of the man who, at the height 
of his fame, turned away from his chosen studies and gave 
up riches and ambition to become a prophet and preacher of 
righteousness. He did not always prophesy soft things.^ 
He was sometimes indignant at us, almost fierce; but never 
in his own cause. There is not the first trace of a mean 
personal resentment in his writings or his life. It was much 
to be without a rival in the magic and mastery of language ; 
it was more to have filled near two score volumes with 
beauty and wisdom, with never a line of vulgarity, or mal- 
ice, or irreverence ; but perhaps the historian will give him 
the highest encomium when he writes down John Ruskin as 
a friend of man. 



A 



BROWNING 

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

LLOW me to preface what I have to say with three 
or four brief quotations. The first shall be a snatch 
of love song: 



All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee: 
All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem : 
In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea: 
Breath and bloom, shade and shine, — wonder, wealth, and — how 
far above them — 
Truth, that's brighter than gem, 
Trust, that's purer than pearl, — 
Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe — all were for me 
In the kiss of one girl. 

Beautiful that, eh? And what a lilt in its music! Just a 
trace of Swinburne, perhaps, in its alliterations and asso- 
nance, written, you would say, by some young fellow with 
a remarkable ear for metrical effect and a quick eye for 
beauty of sense. Not much depth doubtless, but the old 
note, ever new, of young love and bright fancy. 

But here is something that strikes a deeper note, of 
poignant pain, of the love that is stronger than death: 

You'll love me yet ! — and I can tarry 

Your love's protracted growing: 
June reared that bunch of flowers you carry, 

From seeds of April's sowing. 

I plant a heartfull now: some seed 

At least is sure to strike. 
And yield — what you'll not pluck indeed. 

Not love, but, may be, like. 
291 



292 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

You'll look at least on love's remains, 

A grave's one violet : 
Your look? — that pays a thousand pains. 

What's death ? You'll love me yet ! 

What a haunting pathos; this surely is the verse of maturer 
life. Well, the first verses were written when the poet was 
seventy-eight years old; the second, when he was twenty- 
eight. But in both alike what directness and simplicity; 
the man has, you say, deep feeling in youth and fresh feel- 
ing in age, but in both his thought is pellucid and clear. 
Now let me read another bit of what I suppose to be love 
poetry too : 

Room after room, 

I hunt the house through 

We inhabit together. 

Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her — 

Next time, herself! — not the trouble behind her 

Left in the curtain, the couch's perfume! 

As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew; 

Yon looking-glass gleamed at the wave of her feather. 

Yet the day wears. 

And door succeeds door; 

I try the fresh fortune — 

Range the wide house from the wing to the centre. 

Still the same chance! she goes out as I enter. 

Spend my whole day in the quest, — who cares? 

But 't is twilight, you see, — with such suites to explore, 

Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune! 

Something in the line of allegory, apparently; but is it quite 
so clear to you what it means? The thought would seem to 
be subtle, and the writer not quite able to handle his analo- 
gies so as to do more than suggest vaguely his meaning. 
The music is gone, too, and even the meter halts a little. 
But at all events, in all three of the passages is the same 
delicacy, a certain sensitiveness to finer spiritual moods. 
The man's art of expression, you will say, may not be quite 
so clear and facile as we thought at first, but how refined 
are his sympathies! His execution may sometimes be in- 



BROWNING 293 

adequate to his remoter thought, but we shall be sure to 
find in all his work, however profound and however virile, 
an inner grace, a spiritual charm. And as we read page 
after page we find such an interpretation verified. But we 
turn another leaf, and, suddenly — what is this? — Mr. 
Sludge, "the Medium." 

Now, don't, sir! Don't expose me! Just this once! 

This was the first and only time, I'll swear, — 

Look at me, — see, I kneel, — the only time, 

I swear, I ever cheated, — ^yes, by the soul 

Of Her who hears — (your sainted mother, sir!) 

All, except this last accident, was truth — 

This little kind of slip! — and even this. 

It was your own wine, sir, the good champagne, 

(I took it for Catawba, you're so kind,) 

Which put the folly in my head ! 

"Get up?" 
You still inflict on me that terrible face? 
You show no mercy? — Not for Her dear sake, 
The sainted spirit's, whose soft breath even now 
Blows on my cheek — (don't you feel something, sir?) 
You'll tell? 

Go tell, then ! Who the devil cares 
What such a rowdy chooses to . . . 

Aie — aie — aie ! 
Please, sir! your thumbs are through my windpipe, sir! 
Ch— ch! 

Well, sir, I hope you've done it now! 
Oh Lord ! I little thought, sir, yesterday. 
When your departed mother spoke those words 
Of peace through me, and moved you, sir, so much. 
You gave me — (very kind it was of you) 
These shirt-studs — (better take them back again. 
Please, sir) — yes, little did I think so soon 
A trifle of trick, all through a glass too much 
Of his own champagne, would change my best of friends 
Into an angry gentleman! 

And then follow thirty mortal pages filled with keen psy- 
chological analysis in which this poor devil of a trickster 



294 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

turns his vulgarity wrong side out and upside down and 
holds it in every light for our inspection. One flounders 
through it and emerges at the end muttering, "Is this poetry, 
or what is it?" For it is plain that it is something in the 
way of literature; its very grotesqueness has a kind of force. 
There's life in it, at all events. 

These passages taken almost at random may serve to 
suggest the great variety of manner and theme in Robert 
Browning's poetry; though they only suggest it, for it would 
be quite possible to select three times as many more pas- 
sages each of an entirely different type from all the rest. 
I doubt whether any poet of the nineteenth century has so 
wide a range; and certainly no other recent poet of anything 
like equal eminence has left so large a body of verse. It 
is evident, therefore, that it is not easy to hit off an 
estimate of Browning in a few well-turned sen- 
tences, or map his work neatly out in half an hour's 
talk. 

But these quotations may also suggest one reason why 
there is so much diversity of opinion upon Browning. The 
truth is there is Browning and Browning: some very clear 
and some very cloudy, some very graceful and some very 
grotesque, some very good and some — well let us say, very 
peculiar. But we are always inclined to rate an author's 
work in the lump. We take our poets as we take our wives, 
to love and to cherish for better and for worse. The result 
is that striking diversities of quality in a really great poet 
are sure to provoke strenuous attack and strenuous defense. 
It is hardly in human nature that the reader who falls gen- 
uinely in love with Pippa and Colombe and Pompilia and 
Rabbi Ben Ezra should be equally enamored of Hohenstiel- 
Schwangau and Jochanan Hakkadosh; yet ten to one, he 
will feel bound to stand up for his Browning stoutly all 
through; while on the other hand that unfortunate mortal 
who, with some foolish notion of beginning at the beginning, 
has taken his first taste of Browning out of Pauline or Sor- 
dello will doubtless always go on protesting that he can find 
neither poetry nor meaning in that man. 



BROWNING 295 

I realize that it is a somewhat hazardous venture to 
speak upon any question on which opinions are so sharply 
divided; especially if one feels obliged, as I must, to take 
the view of Sir Roger de Coverley, that there's much to be 
said on both sides. It is certainly absurd to speak of the 
most of Browning's poetry as unintelligible, or even diffi- 
cult; most of it is easy enough to all persons who don't in- 
sist on taking their poetry merely as a beverage or an ano- 
dyne. And I am willing to go a great deal further than 
that. Browning's best things move me more deeply, seem 
to me to have more of the genuine quality of inspiration, 
than any other poetry of this century — save some of Words- 
worth's only. But, on the other hand, I cannot deny that 
some of his verse seems admirably suited to tax the wits 
of the commentator and to furnish pleasant exercise to the 
ingenuity of Browning Societies. Either the themes are not 
intrinsically poetical or they are treated in a subtle, analytic 
fashion inconsistent with genuine poetical handling. When 
the twentieth century shall have sifted the work of the nine- 
teenth, I must doubt whether Sordello, or Red Cotton 
Night-Cap Country^ or Pacchiarotto, or the Parleyings, or 
many of Ferishtah's Fancies will be found among the poetry 
that men still read. For this admission, however, we con- 
sole ourselves by remembering that posterity has been con- 
tent to forget the earliest and the latest work of many great 
poets, — Wordsworth, for example. And the amount of 
Browning's work is so large that you may throw out a good 
deal and still leave enough to furnish a broad basis for his 
fame. 

But it seems to me there are some deficiencies and limita- 
tions characteristic of Mr. Browning's verse at every period 
of his life. Let me mention some of them. What conces- 
sions we must make to the perverse who will none of 
Browning, we will make at once and have done with it. In 
the first place, I believe we must admit that much of Brown- 
ing's work, even in his best period, is lacking in grace. It 
leaves upon us the impression of robust vigor rather than 
of beauty. The truth is Browning did not much care to 



296 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

produce the impression of beauty. "Poesy," says Keats 
somewhere, "is a drainless shower of light," 

And they shall be accounted poet kings 
Who simply tell the most heart-easing things. 

Now this is precisely what Browning would not have said. 
The object of poetry, in his thought, was not to soothe, but 
to rouse; not to minister to our delight, but to enlarge and 
intensify our life. And if it is said — as it may be with 
truth — that this is the highest office of poetry, why we have 
still to insist that it is not the only office; that poetry should 
have charm as well as might; and that the poet who neglects 
the sweet persuasive grace of beauty foregoes half his 
birthright. There is a poetry, and noble poetry, that ap- 
peals primarily to the passive side of our natures, that 
calms and tranquilizes; it is the poetry that is akin to 
peace. But of that kind of poetry Browning never wrote 
a line. And more than this there rests upon the truest 
poetry a certain bloom of beauty. And this Browning's 
does not have. Not but that his verse has frequent passages 
of very great beauty. These passages will usually be found 
where his passion is at its height, and the intensity of his 
emotion sweeps away all indirections and melts down all 
the rougher and more untractable elements of his language 
into clear and glowing utterance. Then he sometimes has 
the impassioned grace of our old Elizabethan writers — there 
are such passages not a few in the dramas and in The Ring 
and the Book; not many in his later work. Very often in 
his lyrical monologues, too, when the joy or the pathos is 
at its keenest, the language suddenly takes on that thrilling 
sweetness, the last charm of poetry. Thus, for instance, 
in A Toccata of Galuppi's, where the old Venetian's light 
music, with its accidental minor strain, suggests all the life 
and laughter and love that once listened to those notes, — 

till in due time, one by one, 
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone, 
Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun. 



BROWNING 297 

As for Venice and her people, merely bom to bloom and drop, 
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the 

crop: 
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop? 

"Dust and ashes!" So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold. 
Dear dead women, with such hair, too — what's become of all the 

gold 
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old. 

Those last lines send a shiver of passionate, sweet regret 
into the soul. But Browning's lighter verse seldom has 
this crowning grace. He cannot give to ordinary emotion 
the charm of phrase, or beautify by speech the common face 
of life. 

Sometimes Browning seems to have a positive prefer- 
ence for the harsh or the grotesque for its own sake. He 
carries his fear of anything sentimental or effeminate to the 
opposite extreme, and bandies slang about the most grace- 
ful themes. In diction, he had a fancy for the outre, the 
colloquial, sometimes even for the vulgar. Why should a 
man end what he calls a poem, on the charm of art, with 
such a stanza as this? — 

Hobbs hints blue, — straight he turtle eats: 
Nobbs prints blue, — claret crowns his cup: 
Nokes outdoes Stokes in azure feats, — 
Both gorge. Who fished the murex up ? 
What porridge had John Keats? 

So too in meter he often prefers audacious, jolting 
rhymes apparently for no better reason than that they are 
sure to shake the reader up. You remember, for instance, 
that little poem. Youth and Art, in which a man and a 
woman no longer young look back upon the early days when, 
rooming on opposite sides of the street, they were very con- 
veniently situated for falling in love, but preferred art in- 
stead, and so lost the chance of life. It is a very character- 
istic poem, with a genuine touch of pathos in it, quite 
unforgetable, — but you may remember some of its rhymes: 



298 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

No harm! It was not my fault 

If you never turned your eye's tail up 
As I shook upon E in alt.j 

Or ran the chromatic scale up: 

Could you say so, and never say, 

"Suppose we join hands and fortunes, 
And I fetch her from over the way, 

Her, piano, and long tunes and short tunes"? 

But you meet the Prince at the Board, 

I'm queen myself at bals-pare, 
I've married a rich old lord. 

And you're dubbed knight and an R. A. 

Now here Browning wants to illustrate the truth — a 
favorite truth with him, and lying, as we shall see, at the 
bottom of his philosophy of life — that our unsophisticated, 
spontaneous affections are a safer guide to happiness than 
prudence or ambition; but he is so fearful his sentiment may 
get limp or languorous that he dashes in these strokes of ab- 
surdity in his rhymes. The humor in these passages too is 
very characteristic of him. For Browning's humor often 
consists chiefly in a kind of rough familiarity of manner, a 
brusque but jovial gaucherie. We Americans would say it 
has a Western flavor. He is quite unabashed in the face 
of the greatest names, and slaps the most dignified virtues 
on the back with a kind of loud intimacy. 

Now I take it that in all these cases the undeniable 
attraction which the grotesque had for Browning is ex- 
plained by the fact that in the grotesque there is always a 
certain vigor and strength. It is, so to say, a specific against 
over-refinement and softness of manner, a proof of that 
robustness and mass which Browning liked. The truth is, 
he was so in love with force that he was a little afraid of 
the soothing effect of grace, of melodious numbers, and 
rather liked any device that would shock or startle. He 
had the broad Gothic taste that, under its loveliest arches, 
high up among the flowing lines, will carve its capitals into 
quaint and grinning faces. He relished a dash of wild, 
strong flavor in life. Some of the most vigorous of his 



BROWNING 299 

short poems are studies in sheer force, in picturesque or 
rugged shape. Take, for instance, the Soliloquy of the 
Spanish Cloister. One sees how Browning enjoyed that 
picture of crude, ignorant, and here half-innocent, but in- 
tense malignity. The monk is looking out the window at 
his pet aversion, meek, fair-faced Brother Lawrence, who 
is watering his flowers in the garden: 

Gr-r-r — there go, my heart's abhorrence! 

Water your damned flower-pots, do ! 
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence, 

God's blood, would not mine kill you ! 
What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming? 

Oh, that rose has prior claims — 
Needs its leaden vase filled brimming? 

Hell dry you up with its flames! 

At the meal we sit together: 

Salve tibi! I must hear 
Wise talk of the kind of weather, 

Sort of season, time of year: 
Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely 

Dare zue hope oak-galls, I doubt: 
What's the Latin name for "parsley"? 

What's the Greek name for Swine's Snout? 

Oh, those melons ! If he's able 

We're to have a feast ! so nice ! 
One goes to the Abbot's table, 

All of us get each a slice. 
How go on your flowers? None double? 

Not one fruit-sort can you spy? 
Strange! — And I, too, at such trouble 

Keep them close-nipped on the sly! 

There's a great text in Galatians, 

Once you trip on it, entails 
Twenty-nine distinct damnations. 

One sure, if another fails: 
If I trip him just a-dying, 

Sure of heaven as sure can be, 
Spin him round and send him flying 

Off to hell, a Manichee? 



300 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Or, there's Satan! — one might venture 

Pledge one's soul to him yet leave 
Such a flaw in the indenture 

As he'd miss till, past retrieve, 
Blasted lay that rose-acacia 

We're so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine . . . 
'St, there's Vespers! Plena gratia, 

Ave, Virgo! G-r-r — you swine! 

Only I think Browning always in danger of overdoing 
this tendency to crude strength. He forgets that in the 
very best poetry strength and beauty are married. For his 
grotesqueness is not infrequently quite gratuitous; he con- 
stantly makes upon one the impression of a man not daring 
to be as graceful as he can. In the Epilogue to one of his 
later volumes — the Pacchtarotto — he expressly disclaims 
the wish to charm by beauty of manner, and avers that 
strength and sweetness cannot go together : 

'Tis said I brew stiff drink, 

But the deuce a flavor of grape is there. 
Hardly a May-go-down, 't is just 
A sort of gruff Go-down-it-must — 
No Merry-go-dowTi, no gracious gust 

Commingles the racy with Springtide's rare! 

"What wonder," say you, "that we cough, and blink, 
At Autumn's heady drink?" 

Is it a fancy, friends? 

Mighty and mellow are never mixed, 
Though mighty and mellow be born at once. 
Sweet for the future, — strong for the nonce ! 

Man's thoughts and loves and hates! 
Earth is my vineyard, these grew there : 

Earth's yield ! Who yearn for the Dark Blue Sea's, 
Let them "lay, pray, bray" — the addle-pates! 
Mine be Man's thoughts, loves, hates! 

But I believe there is a heresy in these lines that has done 
much to limit the value of their author's work. Despite his 
assertion it still is true that mighty and mellow are mixed 
in the wine the greatest poets pour us; and I fear that to 



BROWNING 301 

some of Mr. Browning's vintage no ripening years will 
ever give the true ambrosial flavor. 

And then I should say, more broadly, that Browning 
was always deficient in the sense of phrase, had not in any 
very high degree the gift of poetic expression. We all 
read Browning, — I suppose, — many of us admire him, most 
of us wonder at him; but who quotes him? The fact is 
that, for the most part. Browning is not a quotable poet. 
Even in his best poems, those that most arouse and inspire, 
I do not often find that subtle felicity of phrase which slips 
into the memory and stays there. His word is not the spon- 
taneous, inevitable one. His line doesn't have that inde- 
finable magical power which marks the most perfect work. 
Mr. Matthew Arnold, you remember, used to fix upon this 
power of phrase and single lines, as the surest touchstone 
of really great poetry. It is a mark, an accent of distinction, 
he used to say, which we recognize but cannot explain. Now 
that this quality is entirely a matter of expression, one 
would hardly affirm; but surely it is largely so. For we 
often find it when the underlying thought is neither new nor 
commanding. Could anything be simpler, for instance, 
than the thought and sentiment of Wordsworth's lines to his 
Highland reaper who sings among the sheaves? 

Will no one tell me what she sings? 
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow 
For old, unhappy, far off things, 
And battles long ago. 

And yet the accent is here. And, on the other hand, it is 
often wanting in poetry of vivid imagination and intense 
emotion. Browning's poetry will afford us proof enough 
of that. Take his Andrea del Sarto, for example, one of 
the greatest short poems of this century, conceived with 
keenest dramatic sympathy, suffused with the deepest 
pathos, the pathos of failure. I seem to see that man 
Andrea always, see the very heart of him; nay, I see even 
that still, gray twilight on the slope of Fiesoli when he told 



302 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

his story, hear in the hush of it the clear note of the convent 
bell, and the low whistle of the lurking lover; but I can 
hardly recall a single line of what Andrea says. Browning 
often seems to me to be striving hard for adequate expres- 
sion, but not quite attaining it. It is as if his thought were 
too swift for his word. He is an eager, tongue-tied poet. 
Had his gift of utterance and his artistic sense of form been 
commensurate with his other powers, I am inclined to say 
that Robert Browning would have been the greatest English 
poet in the last two centuries. 

Of late years it hasn't been quite the correct thing to 
call Browning obscure. It used to be. Even the youngest 
of us is old enough to remember when Browningese was 
spoken of as "a Babylonish dialect" ; when a select school 
offered instruction in French, German, and — Browning; 
when Douglas Jerrold, — was it he? — once in convalescence, 
thanked God he'd not gone mad, after his wife, to whom he 
had handed the book, confessed that she, too, could make 
nothing of the Sordello: and a multitude of other such 
stories, now grown somewhat musty. For we have 
changed all that; and nowadays not to understand Browning 
is by no means a proof of sanity, — rather the con- 
trary. To be sure, his admirers admit that his style 
has striking peculiarities; that, however, they claim is a 
merit. It is highly individual, they say; it is Browning's 
own. No one else writes anything like it, — which is prob- 
ably true; though whether it be a merit or not, there may 
be difference of opinion. I should think it would have to be 
admitted that there are certain peculiarities of Browning's 
manner that do not always tend to clearness. For instance, 
as all his readers know. Browning is especially prone to 
audacities of ellipsis and arrangement. He is impatient of 
those humbler parts of speech that only serve the grammar; 
and he goes through his verses with merciless spud to root 
out all the prepositions and conjunctions and relative pro- 
nouns. His ventures in arrangement are sometimes still 
more confusing. Mr. Hutton singles out these two lines 
from the Sordello, 



BROWNING 303 

To be by him themselves made act, 
Not watch Sordello acting each of them. 

"What they mean," says Mr. Hutton, "I have not the most 
distant notion. Mr. Browning might as well have written 
*To be by him, her, himself, herself, themselves, made act, 
etc' for any vestige of meaning I can attach to this curious 
mob of pronouns and verbs." If this seems rather severely 
obtuse of Mr. Hutton, why we must remember that it was 
written nearly a half century ago, before the Browning sense 
had been so generally developed. But the lines are a good 
example of the liberties Browning allows himself in throw- 
ing words together. Proper accentuation makes them in- 
telligible, I suppose : 

To be by him themselves made act, 
Not watch Sordello acting each of them; 

that is, To be themselves made to act by Sordello, and not 
each of them to watch his acting. It is commonly taken to 
be a rule of good composition, whether in prose or verse, 
that the structure shall be so clear that none of the reader's 
mental energy need be consumed in deciding what the order 
of thought is. But it is evident that Mr. Browning never 
did consent to be under bondage to any hard laws of the 
rhetoric or grammar. When these liberties result in some 
undoubted poetic gain, some increased swiftness or inten- 
sity, why it would be finical to object to them; nay, in such 
cases, the quickened perception of the reader will usually 
find no difficulty in them. But I think they sometimes occur 
when there is no such excuse. Good composition either in 
prose or poetry is vastly difficult work; Browning seemed 
always somewhat impatient of it, and a little too much in- 
clined to insist on a division of the labor between himself 
and his reader. 

Then again, the poetic form Browning preferred usually 
makes at least a second reading necessary. For two thirds 
of all Browning's poetry, nine tenths of all his best poetry, 
is in the form of the dramatic monologue. Now the dra- 



304 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

matic monologue is what the Irishman called pretty accu- 
rately "a dialogue between one person." And if there's a 
bull in the definition, why there's a bull in the thing. The 
dramatic monologue is not a soliloquy, but really a bit of 
drama; there is only one speaker, but at least one other 
person is supposed to be present, interjecting questions, re- 
plying, approving or disapproving, and continually chang- 
ing the inflection of the speaker's statement. Moreover, 
there is usually no means of knowing, to begin with, who is 
the speaker, what are his circumstances, or what the theme 
of his speaking. It is, as I said, a bit of drama, but a bit 
of drama without any list of dramatis persona, with no 
indication of scene or character, and with all the parts can- 
celled but one. In fact, if you sit in a perfectly dark room 
and hear an entire stranger talk into the hither end of a 
telephone, you will have a very neat idea of the plan of the 
dramatic monologue. I don't mean to imply that this 
monologue is not often a most effective artistic form ; it is, 
and often very beautiful too. Nothing could be better suited 
to that intense and concentrated expression of personality in 
which Browning excels ; but none the less, it is a somewhat 
difficult form for the reader. In the first place it is usually 
necessary to read the whole poem through once in order to 
get at the persons and the situation; we must, so to speak, 
walk quite round the house on the outside before we can find 
the door to let us in. And then the condensed and highly 
suggestive nature of the composition calls for the closest and 
most sympathetic attention from the reader throughout. 

But Browning's worst obscurity does not arise from 
any such mannerisms in form and structure. With his man- 
nerisms we can become familiar; but no amount of familiar- 
ity will ever make easy such a passage as this. It is from 
one of the most interesting of his later books, Ferishtah's 
Fancies, and the subject of it is the possibility of taking an 
optimistic view of this present evil world : 

"Take one and try conclusions — this, suppose ! 
God is all-good, all-wise, all-powerful: truth? 
Take it and rest there. What is man? Not God: 



BROWNING 305 

None of these absolutes therefore, — yet himself, 

A creature with a creature's qualities. 

Make them agree, these two conceptions! Each 

Abolishes the other. Is man weak. 

Foolish and bad? He must be Ahriman, 

Co-equal with an Ormuzd, Bad with Good, 

Or else a thing made at the Prime Sole Will, 

Doing a maker's pleasure — with results 

Which — call, the wide world over, 'what must be' — 

But, from man's point of view, and only point 

Possible to his powers, call — evidence 

Of goodness, wisdom, strength ? we mock ourselves 

In all that's best of us, — man's blind but sure 

Craving for these in very deed not word, 

Reality and not illusions. Well, — 

Since these nowhere exist — nor there where cause 

Must have effect, nor here where craving means 

Craving unfollowed by fit consequence 

And full supply, aye sought for, never found — 

These — what are they but man's own rule of right? 

A scheme of goodness recognized by man. 

Although by man unrealizable, — 

Not God's with whom to will were to perform : 

Nowise performed here, therefore never willed. 

What follows but that God, who could the best, 

Has willed the worst, — while man, with power to match 

Will with performance, were deservedly 

Hailed the supreme — provided . . . here's the touch 

That breaks the bubble . . . this concept of man's 

Were man's own work, his birth of heart and brain. 

His native grace, no alien gift at all. 

The bubble breaks here. Will of man create? 

No more than this my hand which strewed the beans 

Produced them also from its finger-tips. 

Back goes creation to its source, source prime 

And ultimate, the single and the sole." 

I should think the most ardent devotee of Browning must 
admit this to be obscure. He would doubtless say, however, 
that its obscurity Is due to the abstruseness and subtlety of 
the thought. We cannot expect, he would urge, easy and 
simple expression upon such a theme, any more than we 
expect It in Butler's Analogy or the philosophy of the Un- 
conscious; even angelic Intelligences on such themes — as 



3o6 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Milton may remind us — "find no end, in wandering mazes 
lost." Well, I should say that if any subject does present 
such inherent difficulties as to make clear statement impos- 
sible, why then it is not a fit subject for poetry. But the 
truth is that the obscurity in such passages as this, is largely 
in the expression. The thought is not methodically arranged 
or clearly drawn out. The poet is impatient to be at the 
goal of his argument; he starts a thought and leaves it half 
uttered to hasten after another; he cuts his sentence into dis- 
jointed fragments; he hopelessly deranges his grammar; 
almost the only mark of punctuation in the passage is that 
last resort of puzzled syntax, the dash, of which there are 
thirteen in the lines I read. The result is that the passage 
looks like a page of Butler's Analogy, but a page of Butler's 
Analogy struck by lightning. Something of this kind of ob- 
scurity you can find in every volume Browning wrote ; in 
Pauline, and Sordello, and Ferishtah, and La Saisiaz, and 
Parleyings you can find a great deal of it. 

Another and even more vexatious kind of obscurity oc- 
curs, now and then, In the work even of Mr. Browning's 
best period. I mean that obscurity which results from the 
attempt to convey definite meaning by remote, or fanciful, 
or confused analogies. For instance here is the last stanza 
of a little poem — I suppose the situation suggested by the 
two preceding stanzas is that of a lover who tires of his lady, 
of the constant bloom of June ; but I don't think the meaning 
is made much clearer by the context : 

And after, for pastime, 

If June be refulgent 
With flowers in completeness, 

All petals, no prickles, 

Delicious as trickles 
Of wine poured at mass-time, — 

And choose One indulgent 

To redness and sweetness; 
Or if, with experience of man and of spider, 
June use my June-lightning, the strong insect-ridder. 
And stop the fresh film-work, — why, June will consider. 



BROWNING 307 

It is only a dim conjecture I get from this; but I am sure Mr. 
Browning meant me to get something more than that. 
There is, you know, a kind of lyric poetry which does not 
ask any definite meaning, but like music only vaguely sug- 
gests a sentiment or emotion; Shelley wrote indescribably 
beautiful verse of that sort; but Browning doesn't. The in- 
tellectual element in him is too strong for that, and in all 
his lyrics you feel sure there is definite meaning, if only 
you could get at it. 

I think the cause of such obscurity as that of the 
two passages I have just read is to be found in that peculiar 
constitution of Browning's genius from which proceeds most 
that is characteristic, good as well as bad, in all his work. 
His obscurity is an almost inevitable accompaniment of that 
combination of qualities upon which his power depends. 
For, if we seek to analyze Browning's genius, we shall find, 
I think, at the root of it, as its essential, distinguishing char- 
acteristic, the union of two qualities not often combined in 
one man, — the intense, eager temper, and the curious, subtle, 
speculative temper. To find either of these alone is common 
enough ; to find them together is extremely uncommon. The 
temperament of the lover or the hero united with the tem- 
perament of the casuist or the diplomat, — that is Browning. 
When the two sides of his nature work together with bal- 
ance and harmony, then indeed we have poetry that for 
combined passion and wisdom is unmatched in the nineteenth 
century. But what I am just now insisting on is that the 
work of such a writer must often be obscure. His curious, 
subtilizing intellect is attracted, not by the broad and open 
truths of life, common to all men and easily understood, but 
rather by the mysterious truths that lie in the depths of our 
souls, by those questions of conduct that are perplexed and 
diflicult, by those types of character that are unusual or 
enigmatic. Browning always had this predilection for in- 
tricate psychology, or for puzzling questions of casuistry. 
Nothing pleased him better than to expose the plausible rea- 
sonings with which men deceive others and half deceive 



3o8 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

themselves. Bishop Blougram^ s Apology, for Instance, and 
Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau are good examples of the zest 
with which he tracked a speaker through a long course of 
special pleading to a conclusion recognized as only half 
true at last. To handle themes like these with clearness 
demands not only consummate skill but tireless patience. 
You must have either the slow analytic habit of mind which 
is content to syllogize and demonstrate, or else the brooding, 
reflective habit which gradually transmutes thought into 
image and sentiment, as Tennyson does, for instance, In the 
In Memoriam. But neither habit Is possible to Browning's 
eager, passionate temper. His mental action is always 
swift and nervous. His perception darts like quicksilver 
through all the windings of an intricate mental process. 
His mind is always a-wrestle. It never lies quiet to mirror 
the shapes of passing thought, as Tennyson's always does. 
Still less can he endure the reasoning process. He cannot 
delay for the deliberate steps of logic. You will find all 
Browning's deepest beliefs rest at last not on reasoning 
but on the swifter assurance of intuition. If a man thus 
attempts, as Browning habitually does, to write upon the 
most abstruse themes of the philosopher with the fine frenzy 
of the lover, when he succeeds, he will be sure to write 
wise and noble poetry; but when he does not succeed, he will 
be sure to write very obscure poetry. Browning certainly 
illustrates both statements. That he failed in his early at- 
tempts is not strange; it would have been incredible had he 
succeeded. In Pauline and Sordello he was trying to explore 
the most hidden recesses of the human heart at an age when 
Tennyson was practising his onomatopoeia with Airy Fairy 
Lilians and Marianas in the Moated Grange. In his later 
verse, too, I think it must be admitted that the metaphysics 
are often too much for the poetry. As I have Intimated, 
at my time of life I don't propose to go through the diffi- 
culties of forming a taste for Fifine, Ferishtah, and the rest. 
But there is that long, glorious period of thirty years, be- 
tween Sordello and Fifine, in which his work, with slight 
exception, is clear, well-balanced, inspiring; on the whole 



BROWNING 309 

I think a nobler body of verse than any other English poet 
wrote between 1840 and 1870. 

For I have played the advocatus diaboli long enough. I 
too claim to be a lover of Browning, if not a devotee. Let 
us come to his praises. 

I may summarize all I have to say in praise of Brown- 
ing — and higher praise I hardly know how to give — in the 
statement that he is preeminently, and in all senses, the poet 
of life. He had what has been called "the splendid capacity 
for being alive" himself. No other English poet since 
Shakespeare leaves upon us the impression of such intense 
vitality as Robert Browning. He evidently made that im- 
pression upon all those who knew him personally, — a large, 
robust, healthy personality, pulsing full of life in body, brain, 
and heart. There was nothing narrow and nothing languid 
about the man. He seemed to put the whole of himself into 
his every act. And this personal force was so eager and 
expansive that the man couldn't be conventionalized, or 
narrowed into exclusive sympathy with any class or order. 
He was, in the best sense, the most democratic of English 
poets. Think of trying to say Lord Browning! You know 
he is the only English poet of eminence in the last two cen- 
turies who lived to be over sixty years old without settling 
back into the ranks of the political conservatives. You 
remember his sonnet. Why I am a Liberal, written when he 
was seventy-three years old : 

"Wh)'^?" Because all I haply can and do, 
All that I am now, all I hope to be, — 
Whence comes it save from fortune setting free 
Body and soul the purpose to pursue, 
God traced for both? If fetters, not a few, 
Of prejudice, convention, fall from me, 
These shall I bid men — each in his degree 
Also God-guided — bear, and gayly, too? 

But little do or can the best of us: 

That little is achieved through Liberty. 

Who, then, dares hold, emancipated thus, 
His fellow shall continue bound? Not I, 

Who live, love, labor freely, nor discuss 

A brother's right to freedom. That is "Why." 



3IO AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

And his vitality never waned. His optimism was invincible. 
He never reached the term when he was ready to say, 

It is time to be old, 
To take in sail. 

His later work may be obscure, but not because he was 
aging; rather, as I said, it is because his powers are too 
eager and swift; he is surging too full of life for the meas- 
ured and ordered utterance his theme demands. Browning 
is the only English poet I remember who lived to see more 
than fifty years and didn't grow old a day. Age couldn't 
wither him. And this personal force of the man goes into 
all his work, making it vital, stimulating. You can't read 
Browning while you are standing on one leg or slipping into 
an after dinner doze. 

Now with this intense interest in life himself, it was in- 
evitable that Browning in his poetry should be concerned 
almost entirely, not with abstractions, but with persons. The 
title of one of his best volumes might be fitly applied to all 
his works, Men and Women. He never really cared for any- 
thing else. He had a remarkable gift of description; but 
he seldom cared to use it. Almost never will you find in his 
verse those long and brilliant passages of pure description 
which so often brighten the pages of Tennyson. The land- 
scape was of interest to Browning only as a setting for his 
action, and his best pictures of it are momentary vivid 
glimpses seen through the passion-illumined eyes of some of 
his men and women. Take this of the Roman Campagna, 
as it is seen — nay, as the very soul of it is felt — by the 
yearning lovers set solitary in the midst of it, — 

The champaign with its endless fleece 
Of feathery grasses everywhere! 
Silence and passion, joy and peace, 

An everlasting wash of air — 
Rome's ghost since her decease. 

Readers of Browning will remember how many of his best 
poems have some vivid setting in the external world — the 
gray twilight of Andrea del Sarto; the morning of David's 



BROWNING 311 

divine vision in Saul; those pauses in the flight of Pompilia 
and Caponsacchi — 

We stepped into a hovel to get food ; 

All outside is lone field, moon and such peace. 

What a lovely line that ! And the passionate, thunder-laden 
hour of Sebald and Ottima in the Pippa Passes, when 

Swift ran the searching tempest overhead; 

And ever and anon some bright white shaft 

Burned through the pine-tree roof, here burned and there, 

As if God's messenger through the close wood screen 

Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture, 

Feeling for guilty thee and me: then broke 

The thunder like a whole sea overhead — 

Half a hundred such passages will occur to any lover 
of Browning as examples of what I mean. You cannot for- 
get them. But they are hardly description; rather our in- 
tense sympathy with the persons flashes all their surround- 
ings suddenly into our memory forever. 

So, too, Browning even in his most abstruse passages 
seldom discusses general truths in the abstract. It is rather 
the truth as incarnated in persons, taken up into the in- 
dividual life that he cares for. For, after all, men and 
women are the most interesting things in this world. And 
what a company of them in Browning's book! Speak of 
Browning's men and what a throng come crowding into 
memory, — Andrea, and Valence, and Mertoun, and Fra 
Lippo, and Herve Riel, and Waring, and Ogniben, and 
Rabbi Ben Ezra, and Abt Vogler, and the Pope, and Guido, 
and Caponsacchi, and Saul, and David, and John the Apostle 
— and scores of others, each a separate, living human soul. 
And the women — that company is more wonderful still: 
little Pippa, hopeful health and innocence personified; the 
wife in By the Fireside, who, I suppose, is Elizabeth Barrett 
herself; the two Duchesses; Constance; poor Mildred of 
A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, that "lady like a dew drop," 
crushed by a fate more pitiful, more unutterably pathetic 
than anything I remember in modern poetry; noble Colombe, 



312 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

with whom — to say truth — of all the company I am most 
in love myself; and that wonderful Pompilia, Roman waif 
that by God's good grace, even under the smltings of devilish 
malignity, grows into the stature of perfect womanhood, 
learns the ransoming power of a true affection and the mys- 
terious benedictions of motherhood, and dies a blessed 
martyr, a thing enskied and sainted, — but time would fail 
me to do more than begin that long list of Browning's 
women. Surely no other English poet save Shakespeare 
only can match them. And what women they are ! Women 
throughout, not men ; and yet strong as well as sweet, firm of 
will, broad of intellect, rich in all varied graces and charm. 
If I were a woman, I would give Robert Browning, the most 
robust and virile of modern poets, the high praise of having 
shown better than any one else, what woman may be and do. 
And think what a range of experiences, experiences too 
of the most profound questions of human life, is represented 
by these men and women of Browning's creation. In breadth 
of dramatic sympathy Browning, I should say, is the most 
remarkable English poet for two hundred and fifty years; 
some of our novelists may perhaps equal him, but no poet 
can. He isn't, indeed, in the fullest sense of the word a 
dramatist. He hasn't the skill and patience necessary 
for dramatic construction. He is in haste to get at 
the heart of his action, and his dramas usually, there- 
fore, are all catastrophe. And then Browning hasn't 
the serene artistic impartiality of the perfect dramatist. He 
never can hide himself behind his characters, sink his own 
personality in theirs, as Shakespeare does. Browning him- 
self is always in his world, and we are never at a loss to 
perceive his own energetic agreement or dissent in whatever 
his characters utter. His interest in all sorts and conditions 
of men is not the pure joy of the dramatist in watching 
the varied procession of human life pass by, but rather the 
interest of the speculative philosopher and moralist who 
would see what every form of human action and passion, 
even of sin and folly, can say for itself. Even in his best 
period he had rather too much liking for intricate psychol- 



BROWNING 313 

ogy. That is why he prefers the monologue, and why even 
in his dramas the interest all centers in the leading figure. 
He couldn't, like Shakespeare, write a play in the broad 
manner of real life, in which dull folks and poor common- 
place devils have a chance as well as their betters. 

For, however wide the range of Browning's characters, 
you will find that they are all alike in that they all have a 
certain fire and intensity, — a richness of passion or of in- 
tellect, — usually of both. In Browning's men and women 
the tide of life is always at the full. The paler joys, the 
lesser sorrows, the commonplace out of which our tame 
daily life is made, are no stuff for his verse. In this world 
full of strange problems and great passions he has no 
mind to sing the hopes and fears of pretty girls or nice 
young men whose fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, 
to watch the miller's daughter bend above the dimpled 
stream, or Lady Flora take her broidery frame and add 
a crimson to the quaint macaw. There's a charm in all that 
doubtless; but not for a nature eager, like Browning's, to 
plumb the depths of human life. 

All striving and aggressive phases of personality, on the 
other hand, have a fascination for Browning. He loves 
power, and power in exercise. He has a quick sense ever of 
the zest of our animal life of body and senses when it is 
full and healthy. Where is there a better expression of the 
joy of life than in those bounding lines the shepherd boy, 
David, sings to the despondent Saul? 

"Oh, our manhood's prime vigor! No spirit feels waste, 
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced. 
Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock, 
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock 
Of the plunge in a pool's living vi^ater, the hunt of the bear, 
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair. 
And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust divine. 
And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of wine, 
And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell 
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well. 
How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ 
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!" 



314 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

In some of Browning's most admirable studies of char- 
acter we see this vigorous physical life bursting out in revolt 
and waywardness from under the unnatural restraints and 
conventions imposed upon it. There is Fra Lippo, for ex- 
ample, — a ruddy, full-blooded nature, sensuous but not gross, 
and with the artist's quick full feeling of the beauty and life 
of the world. And by sad misfortune, when he was eight 
years old, they had clapped him into a monastery. All the 
man, the painter, the poet in him they tried to cool and 
narrow into the mere monk, — and of course they couldn't. 
One bright night, you remember, he has been out on a frolic 
not quite becoming the cowl and tonsure and is just slipping 
quietly back to get a little sleep before he begins painting 
in the morning again on St. Jerome, 

. . . knocking at his poor old breast 

With his great round stone to subdue the flesh, 

when he is suddenly snapped up by the police. With ready 
assurance, however, he makes friends with his captors, and 
in confidence tells them the story of his life, — how, in some 
way almost unknown to himself, he had when a mere boy 
begun to daub pictures on the wall of the cloister, monks 
first, then folks at church, men and lastly women — the 
Prior's niece — too, just as God made them, till one day the 
Prior looked in and stopped all that in no time: 

I painted all, then cried, " 'T is ask and have; 

Choose, for more's ready!" — laid the ladder flat, 

And showed my covered bit of cloister-wall. 

The monks closed in a circle and praised loud 

Till checked, taught what to see and not to see, 

Being simple bodies, — "That's the very man! 

Look at the boy who stoops to pat the dog! 

That woman 's like the Prior's niece who comes 

To care about his asthma: it's the life!" 

But there my triumph's straw-fire flared and funked ; 

Their betters took their turn to see and say: 

The Prior and the learned pulled a face 

And stopped all that in no time. "How? what's here? 

Quite from the mark of painting, bless us all! 

Faces, arms, legs, and bodies like the true . ' 



BROWNING 315 

As much as pea and pea! it's devil's game! 

Your business is not to catch men with show, 

With homage to the perishable clay, 

But lift them over it, ignore it all. 

Make them forget there's such a thing as flesh. 

Your business is to paint the souls of men — 

Man's soul, and it's a fire, smoke . . . no, it's not . . . 

It's vapor done up like a new-born babe — 

(In that shape when you die it leaves your mouth) 

It's . . . well, what matters talking, it's the soul ! 

Give us no more of body than shows soul ! 

Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms ! 
Rub all out, try at it a second time." 

. . . Now, is this sense, I ask? 
A fine way to paint soul, by painting body 
So ill, the eye can't stop there, must go further 
And can't fare worse! . . . 

. . . Take the prettiest face. 
The Prior's niece . . . patron-saint — is it so pretty 
You can't discover if it means hope, fear, 
Sorrow or joy? won't beauty go with these? 
Suppose I've made her eyes all right and blue. 
Can't I take breath and try to add life's flash, 
And then add soul and heighten them threefold? 
Or say there's beauty with no soul at all — 
(I never saw it — put the case the same — ) 
If you get simple beauty and nought else, 
You get about the best thing God invents: 
That's somewhat: and you'll find the soul you have missed, 
Within yourself, when you return him thanks. 
"Rub all out!" Well, well, there's my life, in short. 
And so the thing has gone on ever since. 
I'm grown a man no doubt, I've broken bounds: 
You should not take a fellow eight years old 
And make him swear to never kiss the girls. 
I'm my own master, paint now as I please — 

And yet the old schooling sticks, the old grave eyes 

Are peeping o'er my shoulder as I work, 

The heads shake still — "It's art's decline, my son ! 

You're not of the true painters, great and old; 

Brother Angelico's the man, you'll find; 

Brother Loren2w stands his single peer: 

Fag on at flesh, you'll never make the third !" 



3i6 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Flower o' the pine. 

You keep your mistr . . . manners, and I'll stick to mine! 

I'm not the third, then: bless us, they must know! 

Don't you think they're the likeliest to know. 

They with their Latin? So, I swallow my rage, 

Clench my teeth, suck my lips in tight, and paint 

To please them — sometimes do, and sometimes don't; 

For, doing most, there's pretty sure to come 

A turn, some warm eve finds me at my saints — 

A laugh, a cry, the business of the world — 

{Flower o' the peach. 

Death for us all, and his own life for each I) 

And my whole soul revolves, the cup runs over, 

The world and life's too big to pass for a dream, 

And I do these wild things in sheer despite. 

And play the fooleries you catch me at, 

In pure rage ! The old mill-horse, out at grass 

After hard years, throws up his stiff heels so, 

Although the miller does not preach to him 

The only good of grass is to make chaff. 

Now in these lines you have not only a very live man 
indeed, but you have the whole protest of the Renaissance 
against the Middle Ages, done in little. 

Cries Fra Lippo, as he thinks of what is possible to art, — 

Oh, oh, 

It makes me mad to see what men shall do 
And we in our graves! This world's no blot for us, 
Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good: 
To find its meaning is my meat and drink. 

These last lines might be taken as a motto for all Brown- 
ing's work: 

'This world — it means intensely and it means good: 
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.' 

For the ends of life, in Browning's thought, are to be 
reached not principally by self-control, by wise restraint and 
temperate acquiescence, but rather by unsated curiosity, 
unending desire and aspiration. 

So, too, it sometimes seems that Browning is in love with 



I 



BROWNING 317 

vigor of any sort, good or bad. And he does have a certain 
sympathy with all action; even the superficial bustle of life, 
the noise and dust of it, I think, had a certain attraction for 
him. They were better than stillness and apathy. He 
could understand those people who like the blaze and blare 
and are emulous of the drum major's place in the human 
procession. "Oh dear," sighs his Italian noble, penned up 
in a lonely villa on the slopes of the mountain, — 

Had I but plenty of money, money enough and to spare, 
The house for me, no doubt, were a house in the city-square ; 
Ah, such a life, such a life, as one leads at the window there ! 

Look, two and two go the priests, then the monks with cowls and 

sandals. 
And the penitents dressed in white shirts, a-holding the yellow 

candles; 
One, he carries a flag up straight, and another a cross with handles, 
And the Duke's guard brings up the rear, for the better prevention 

of scandals: 
Bang-whang-whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife. 
Oh, a day in the city-square, there is no such pleasure in life ! 

So Browning has a few of the most stirring lyrics of ac- 
tion written in this century, — poems of daring or adventure, 
like Herve Riel, or How They Brought the Good News 
from Ghent to Aix, or Pheidippides. He had the genuine 
English love of brawn and grit. He loved to see all a man's 
powers put on a stretch, loved to see how the whole nature 
rises to the strain of a great emergency. This liking was 
strong In him to the end, and some of his most rousing lyrics 
are sandwiched between the casuistry of his latest volumes. 
But, after all, it wasn't merely the action that Browning 
cared for. You will find that for the most part, the charm of 
his narrative poetry does not reside, as that of Scott does, 
in the mere picture of vigorous, healthy, external life, the 
joy of doing brave things in the fresh air, but rather in the 
Inner force of character which the action reveals. The 
secret of his love of action lay in his conviction that in action 
only can the soul get scope and strength. Not in any 
asceticisms, not in retirement and reflection, but in the throng 



3i8 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

and press of men, in wrestle with all life's problems and 
life's evils do we prove what we are made of, and find what 
we are made for. 

Here is Browning's greatest power, — in the realm of 
emotion and passion. Lovers of Browning can claim with- 
out fear of denial that no other poet of the last generation 
has so often shown us the soul rapt into passionate ardors, 
aglow with noble emotion. With noble emotion, I say; 
for the passion of Browning's verse is not fleshly but spirit- 
ual ; nor is it violent, for violence is always a proof of weak- 
ness, but strong, deep, and sane. And, furthermore, you 
will find Browning does not often merely exhibit passion 
or emotion for its own sake as a kind of spectacle, — as 
our modern realists do. He wasn't of that school of writers 
who, thinking with Jaques that all the world's a stage and 
all the men and women merely players, deem it the province 
of literature to make of the pains and joys of human life 
a thrilling show. In Browning's work there is always a 
certain ethical suggestiveness. Even where the passion of 
his men and women is most intense, it still turns our thought 
upon the truths of character and conduct. On reflection we 
find that his best poems are a study of the relation of emo- 
tion to the ends of life. At the bottom of his lyrics we find, 
not as in most poetry a sentiment, but a truth. In fact 
emotion, I think, is always most interesting to Browning 
when it sets at work questioning or speculation, and heats 
the intellect Into unwonted subtlety and power. There Is 
no more wonderful picture of passionate desperation in 
Browning than that of the villain, Guldo, in The Ring and 
the Book; it is a revelation of swiftness and agility of Intel- 
lectual movement, of a venomous keenness of suggestion, of 
devilish subtlety, such as almost takes your breath away : yet 
you can't tell which to wonder at most, the power of Intellect 
or the force of concentrated passion that seethes beneath 
the intellect. In Browning's later work, as we know, the 
intellectual interest got the upper hand; in his zeal to in- 
terpret life, he lost the power to portray it. Yet even in the 
most super-subtilized work of his later period, like Fijine at 



BROWNING 319 

the Fair, the labyrinth of casuistry rests on a basis of feel- 
ing. But in the work of his best time, when intellect and 
emotion are in healthy balance, we find superb examples of 
the charm of a rich and healthy emotion. For Browning 
had no distrust of the passions. He wasn't afraid of them. 
He didn't believe, as some good folks seem to, that our 
passions are given us merely to test our ability to sit down 
on them and keep them under. The emotions, as their name 
implies, are the motive power of life, and no large, efficient 
life is possible without a full and strong emotional nature. 
Indeed, deep and absorbing emotion, if it be healthy, is 
itself one of the ends of life. Better an hour of entire sur- 
render to a noble joy than years of sluggish bondage to 
convention and commonplace. Browning has a whole group 
of poems that illustrate this. Take for instance The Last 
Ride Together. What fate must sever this lover from his 
lady in the future we know not, nor need to know; for this 
hour at least she is his, and that is enough ; 

I said — Then, dearest, since 't is so, 
Since now at length my fate I know, 
Since nothing all my love avails, 
Since all, my life seemed meant for, fails, 

Since this was written and needs must be — 
My whole heart rises up to bless 
Your name in pride and thankfulness! 
Take back the hope you gave, — I claim 
Only a memory of the same, 
— And this beside, if you will not blame. 

Your leave for one more last ride with me. 

Hush, if you saw some western cloud 

All billowy-bosomed, over-bowed 

By many benedictions — sun's 

And moon's, and evening-star's at once — 

And so, 5^ou, looking and loving best, 
Conscious grew, your passion drew 
Cloud, sunset, moonrise, star-shine too, 
Down on you, near and yet more near. 
Till flesh must fade for heaven was here ! — 
Thus leant she and lingered — ^joy and fear! 

Thus lay she a moment on my breast. 



320 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Then we began to ride. My soul 
Smoothed itself out, a long-cramped scroll 
Freshening and fluttering in the wind. 
Past hopes already lay behind. 

What need to strive with a life awry? 
Had I said that, had I done this, 
So might I gain, so might I miss. 
Might she have loved me? just as well 
She might have hated, who can tell ! 
Where had I been now if the worst befell? 

And here we are riding, she and I. 

Fail I alone, in words and deeds? 
Why, all men strive, and who succeeds? 
We rode; it seemed my spirit flew. 
Saw other regions, cities new, 

As the world rushed by on either side. 
I thought, — All labor, yet no less 
Bear up beneath their unsuccess. 
Look at the end of work, contrast 
The petty done, the undone vast. 
This present of theirs with the hopeful past! 

I hoped she would love me; here we ride. 

What does it all mean, poet? Well, 
Your brains beat into rhythm, you tell 
What we felt only; you expressed 
You hold things beautiful the best. 

And place them in rhyme so, side by side. 
'T is something, nay 't is much: but then, 
Have you j'^ourself what's best for men? 
Are you — poor, sick, old ere your time — 
Nearer one whit your own sublime 
Than we who never have turned a rhyme ? 

Sing, riding's a joy! For me, I ride. 

In these sweeping lines there Is little thought of anything 
besides the joy of entire abandonment to an emotion which 
seems for the hour worth all the world. But Browning is 
constantly reminding us that In such hours of supreme emo- 
tion there Is often a distinctively moral value. It Is when 
we get the uplift of some such spiritual elevation that we 
see the truth most clearly; above all, It Is In some such heat 
of soul that we gain the Intensity of conviction needed for 



BROWNING 321 

an earnest, strenuous life. For, in Browning's philosophy of 
life, failure comes oftenest from inertia, from selfish pru- 
dence, from a lack of impassioned devotion to ideal ends. 
We accommodate ourselves; we shrink before life's ob- 
stacles; we grow feeble and lukewarm; and then we lose 
the zest of life, and — what is worse — fail to realize its best 
possibilities. But there are glorious moments when we are 
caught up out of the ways of use and wont and see life in 
the light of some noble passion. It is then that the soul 
learns its reach, finds what it is to be alive, and gets a sense 
of infinite possibilities. These luminous points lighten all 
the lower ranges of our life. 

Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows! 

But not quite so sunk that moments, 
Sure though seldom, are denied us, 

When the spirit's true endowments 
Stand out plainly from its false ones, 

And apprise it if pursuing 
Or the right way or the wrong way, 

To its triumph or undoing. 

Again and again In the lives of Browning's men and women 
do we find these impassioned moments, when emotion be- 
comes revelation and inspiration, — flashes supreme truth 
upon the conviction, or energizes the resolve for a lifetime. 
I can remind you of but one instance — that of Caponsacchi, 
the priest of The Ring and the Book. I must not read at 
length from his monologue, but most of you will remember 
it, — once read it is an unforgetable thing. You remember 
how this idle and gilded priest toying with the pretty sins of 
life suddenly sees one evening the face of Pompilia, — 

A lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad. 

It was as when, in our cathedral once, 

As I got yawningly through matin-song, 

I saw facchini bear a burden up, 

Base it on the high-altar, break away 

A board or two, and leave the thing inside 

Lofty and lone: and lo, when next I looked. 

There was the Rafael! 



322 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

In the revelation of that glance, his past life seems a vain 
and wicked thing. 

What if I turned Christian? It might be! 

And you remember how twice again there come exalted mo- 
ments when he brushes away the tangle of deceits his ene- 
mies have woven about Pompilia and himself, looks straight 
through all his doubts about mere priestly properties, and 
sees his duty as a man and servant of God. They were the 
moments that made his life. 

I know it is sometimes said that Browning glorifies 
impulse too much. They tell us he can pardon anything to 
force. Perhaps the needful but less inspiring virtues of 
prudence and self-command hardly get their rights in his 
verse; but I do not think that Browning in his love of 
power ever forgets virtue. What is true, however, is that 
he admires an active sinner more than a passive one. The 
hopeless character, in his view, is that which hasn't personal 
force enough to make either vice or virtue out of. That 
is the lesson of that poem the moralists are most troubled 
by, The Statue and the Bust. It is the story of a lady who 
sat at her window in Florence and watched the Duke ride by 
in the square below. The lady was the bride of one of the 
hard and cruel Riccardi; the Duke, he for aught I know 
was married too. But even in the first glance each formed 
the resolve to burst all bonds of convention, nay of virtue,, 
for each other's sake. Said the lady to herself, — 

"If I spend the night with that devil twice, 
May his window serve as my loop of hell 
Whence a damned soul looks on paradise!" 

Said the Duke to himself, — 

"Dear or cheap 
As the cost of this cup of bliss may prove 
To body or soul, I will drain it deep." 

But to-day some petty business hinders, and to-morrow, and 
to-morrow; and the years go past until the lady wakes to find 
her beauty fled, and calls Delia Robbia to carve her bust in 



BROWNING 323 

the window where she used to look, and the Duke finds his 
passion faded to a memory, and calls John of Douay to set 
his statue in the square where he used to ride, — memorials 
both, statue and bust, of a purpose, resolved again and 
again, never repented, yet never fulfilled. 
And now soliloquizes Browning: 

Let a man contend to the uttermost 

For his life's set prize, be it what it will! 

The counter our lovers staked was lost 

As surely as if it were lawful coin : 

And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost 

Is — the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, 
Though the end in sight was a vice, I say. 

Browning is putting the extreme case, and as is usual when 
people do that, I think, rather overdoes it. Yet we have 
the best of authority for saying there is no virtue in the 
weak delay that postpones a sin already committed in the 
heart; and Browning is further right in thinking that this 
forceless temper leaves the soul an easy prey to every as- 
sault, and sinks it below all achievement. Only noble aspira- 
tion can lift the man above the fogs of lower life where he 
may see those truths that beckon and allure ; only the strenu- 
ous soul whose righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and 
pharisees may attain to the sight of God and 

all that chivalry of his, 
The soldier-saints who, row on row, 
Burn upward each to his point of bliss. 

If I have succeeded in making at all clear what I deem 
the essential characteristics of all Browning's poetry, I need 
say little of its value. It is a spiritual tonic. When at its 
best, it combines force of passion with depth of thought as 
hardly any other poetry since the Elizabethan days, and 
has the power of that large elder verse to inspire and dilate. 
It can never be genuinely popular. It has too little of 
sensuous beauty for that, is too careless of the obvious and 
superficial interests of life, too deeply freighted with the les- 



324 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

sons of experience. For the same reasons, it must always 
be especially the poetry of middle life. Browning, I suspect, 
will never get the ear of sweet sixteen. He didn't care to. 
The simple charm of inexperienced youth you seldom find 
in his verse, and when you do, it is generally with some hint 
of its slightness or transiency: 

By a cornfield-side, a-flutter with poppies. 
Hark, those two in the hazel coppice — 
A boy and a girl, if the good fates please, 

Making love, say — 

The happier they! 
Draw yourself up from the light of the moon, 
And let them pass — as they will too soon, 

With the beanflowers' boon, 

And the blackbird's tune, 

And May, and June! 

Youth is the bright frontispiece of life; but our main Interest 
is in the book itself. Ogniben, in A Soul's Tragedy — one of 
the shrewdest, most original characters Browning ever drew 
— says with quiet irony, "Youth, with its beauty and grace, 
would seem bestowed on us for some such reason as to 
make us partly endurable till we have time for really becom- 
ing so of ourselves, without their aid; when they leave us." 
But Browning is the only poet I know who can really recon- 
cile one to growing old. We know what the usual poetic 
tone is toward old age, the tone of regret, or at best of 
resignation, — 

The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew 
The heart less bounding to emotion new. 

There is, to be sure, another kind of poetry of old age, the 
poetry of sentimental retrospect, such as John Anderson My 
Jo, and The Miller's Daughter. But this is a sham — it 
is all written by young men. Whenever you come upon 
verse of that sort, be assured the writer is not turned of 
thirty. The really old people know better. They feel that 
no philosophy of life's afternoon can atone for the faded 
poetry of its morning. But Browning, I verily believe, is 



BROWNING 325 

the one poet who thoroughly knows how to grow old. He 
has the wealth of ripened experience, but he keeps also 
the bounding life and eager, forward-looking hopes of youth. 
All seasons meet in him. He reaps the harvests of life's 
autumn, but he has still in his heart the joys of its spring. 
For myself, of later years, when I have a birthday I read 
the only modern poem I know that is really helpful on such 
occasions, Robert Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra. Let me 
close by reading its opening and closing stanzas that show 
how Robert Browning welcomed the swift-coming years : 

Grow old along with me! 

The best is yet to be, 
The last of life, for which the first was made: 

Our times are in his hand 

Who saith, "A whole I planned, 
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!" 

So, take and use thy work: 

Amend what flaws may lurk. 
What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim! 

My times be in thy hand! 

Perfect the cup as planned! 
Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same! 



ART, LOVE, AND RELIGION IN THE POETRY OF 
ROBERT BROWNING 



AMONG the many pleasant anecdotes of Mr. Brown- 
ing that have been told since his death is one to the 
effect that a very young lady who had just been in- 
troduced to him one evening in London and who evidently 
had little knowledge of his poetry, said to the great man 
somewhat timidly, "I don't know whether you care for 
music, Mr. Browning, but if you do, my mother, Lady 

J , is having some on Monday." "Why, my dear I" said 

Browning with the hearty sympathetic manner so character- 
istic of him, "Care for music? I care for nothing else." 

The love of music was born in him. Very likely he in- 
herited it, with the romantic emotional strain in his blood, 
from his maternal grandmother, who was a Creole, born 
in the West Indies. With Browning's own mother also, 
a woman of great depth of feeling, music was a passion. 
Mr. Sharp in his Life of Browning tells a pretty story of 
the childhood of the poet. One afternoon his mother was 
playing in the dusk of twilight to herself, when she was 
startled by a sound behind her. Glancing round, she beheld 
a little white figure distinct against an oak bookcase, and 
could just discern two large, wistful eyes looking earnestly 
at her. The next moment the child had sprung into her 
arms, sobbing passionately at he knew not what, but, as his 
pangs of emotion subsided, whispering over and over, with 
shy urgency, "Play! Play!" Those evening hours of his 
mother's — happy hours of darkness, solitude, and music — 
were among the tenderest lifelong memories of Browning. 
Every reader of his poetry knows what manifold proof of 

326 



BROWNING 327 

his love of music there is in every volume ; and the musicians 
say that such poems as A Toccata of Galuppi's, or Master 
Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, or Aht Vogler betray considerable 
technical knowledge of the art. Certainly such poems are 
remarkable examples of Browning's power to interpret the 
spirit and meaning of music. I have sometimes thought 
it singular that with his keen susceptibility to the charm of 
music, Browning's own faculty of poetic utterance should 
have had so little musical quality, — at all events, so little 
clear and haunting melody. 

But I don't know that Browning's love for music was 
any deeper than his love for painting, indeed for all kinds 
of art. No modern poet, I suppose, had such an eager and 
intelligent interest in all forms of art. It isn't merely that 
he has a large group of poems dealing exclusively with art 
or artists, though there are more than a score of such poems, 
— Fra Lippo, Andrea del Sarto, Pictor Ignottis, Old 
Pictures in Florence, The Guardian-Angel, Aht Vogler, A 
Toccata of Galuppi's and the rest; it is rather that almost 
all his best work is saturated with the history and the spirit 
of art. Most of his life was passed in Italy, and of all the 
many English poet-lovers of Italy, he loved her most. 

Italy, my Italy! 

Queen Mary's saying serves for me — 

(When fortune's malice 

Lost her, Calais) 
Open my heart and you will see 
Graved inside of it, "Italy." 
Such lovers old are I and she: 
So it always was, so ever shall be! 

Yet it wasn't chiefly her history that Browning cared for. 
The Italy he loved was not the great past Italy that holds 
the memories of the world. It was rather the artist's Italy 
that captivated him, I think. He loved his Italy not so much 
because of its august historical associations with the early 
world, as because there, at every turn, in every square, in 
every dim and shabby church, you might come upon some 
statue, tomb, fresco, painting, — some effort of man to ex- 



328 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

press himself in art. He knew the history of the early 
Christian painters a good deal better, I suspect, than the 
history of the early Roman emperors. His longer poems^ 
like The Ring and the Book, are full of traces of minute and 
loving study of the art of Italy; while in all the score of 
volumes he wrote during his life in Italy, I doubt whether 
there is a single passage expressive of that solemn sense of 
the irrevocable past, that broad feeling for the general life 
of man, which Scott and Byron felt so keenly. The historic 
sense was very feeble in Browning. The rise and fall of 
states, the social life of man as embodied in institutions, the 
broad movements of men in the mass, political or military, 
— these things which loom so large on the pages of history. 
Browning didn't care for. He didn't think of them. His 
interest was not in man, but in individual men and women. 
And that is the reason why he cared so much for art. For 
art is the only way the individual has of perpetuating his 
personality. Art to Browning means always the expression 
of spiritual aspiration, the effort of the individual after 
larger and higher life. It is the record of our continual 
strivings after an ideal we can never fully attain. Not to 
copy, though never so accurately, the beauty that the eye 
may see, but to reveal, even to suggest, inadequately, but 
with ever repeated effort, some higher beauty, some divine 
truth, — this is the work of art. 

It was natural that with these views Browning should 
care little for technical excellence. In the poem. Old Pic- 
tures in Florence, he expresses a most emphatic preference 
for the crudest work of the early Christian painters over the 
most perfect statue Greek chisel ever cut. And that because 
while the statue is the skillful embodiment of a complete, 
self-sufficient beauty, in the pictures the artist is struggling, 
albeit in rude and untaught fashion, to utter his soul, to 
express the invisible things of God: 

On which I conclude, that the early painters, 

To cries of "Greek Art and what more wish you?" — 

Replied, "To become now self-acquainters, 
And paint man man, whatever the issue! 



BROWNING 329 

Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray, 

New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters : * 

To bring the invisible full into play! 

Let the visible go to the dogs — what matters?" 

Indeed complete technical excellence would seem to 
Browning to indicate some deficiency of soul. If the hand 
can execute perfectly all that the imagination can conceive, 
it is a proof that the imagination has little sight of the 
highest things; that the artist is losing that temper of ideal 
aspiration in which alone is the salvation of the man. The 
saddest failure is that of him who feels that he has consum- 
mate skill, but no vision. This is the pathos of that poem I 
sometimes think the most pathetic Browning ever wrote, 
the Andrea del Sarto. Andrea is the faultless painter. His 
unerring pencil can mend the lines of Raphael himself. Yet 
as he sits by his window in the hush of twilight and looks 
backward over his life, he knows that life a failure. In his 
heart he knows that the great artists are not those who 
skillfully execute but those who greatly conceive; that suc- 
cess consists not in doing perfectly what you undertake, but 
rather in nobly daring more than any man can perfectly 
attain; 

a man's reach should exceed his grasp, 
— Or what's a heaven for? 

I hardly recall any picture in modern poetry more saddening. 
And it is conceived with vivid dramatic truth; in the tone of 
the man's speech, in the very atmosphere of that still, gray 
evening that hangs upon the slopes of Fiesoli, there is some- 
thing listless, hopeless. It is his wife, you remember, to 
whom he is speaking: 

I often am much wearier than you think, 
This evening more than usual, and it seems 
As if — forgive now — should you let me sit 
Here by the window with your hand in mine 
And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole, 
Both of one mind, as married people use, 
Quietly, quietly the evening through, 



330 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

I might get up to-morrow to my work, 
Cheerful and fresh as ever. Let us try. 

A common grayness silvers everything, — 

All in a twilight, you and I alike 

— You, at the point of your first pride in me 

(That's gone you know), — but I, at every point; 

My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down 

To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole. 

There's the bell clinking from the chapel-top; 

That length of convent-wall across the way , 

Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside; 

The last monk leaves the garden ; days decrease. 

And autumn grows, autumn in everything. 

Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape 

As if I saw alike my work and self. 

And all that I was born to be and do, 

A twilight-piece ..... 

You don't understand 
Nor care to understand about my art, 
But you can hear at least when people speak: 
And that cartoon, the second from the door 
— It is the thing, Love ! so such thing should be — 
Behold Madonna! — I am bold to say. 
I can do with my pencil what I know, 
What I see, what at bottom of my heart 
I wish for, if I ever wish so deep — 
Do easily, too — when I say, perfectly, 
I do not boast, perhaps: . . . 

I do what many dream of all their lives, 

— Dream ? strive to do, and agonize to do. 

And fail in doing. I could count twenty such 

On twice your fingers, and not leave this town, 

Who strive — you don't know how the others strive 

To paint a little thing like that you smeared 

Carelessly passing with your robes afloat, — 

Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says, 

(I know his name, no matter) — so much less! 

Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged. 

There burns a truer light of God in them. 

In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain, 

Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt 

This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine. 

Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know, 



BROWNING 331 

Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me, 
Enter and take their place there sure enough, 
Though they come back and cannot tell the world. 
My works are nearer heaven, but I sit here. 
The sudden blood of these men ! at a word — 
Praise them, it boils, or blame them, it boils too. 
I, painting from myself and to myself, 
Know what I do, am unmoved by men's blame 
Or their praise either. .... 

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, 
Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-gray 
Placid and perfect with my art : the worse ! 

And you will notice the crowning pathos of the picture is 
that Andrea sits down at the end, acquiescent, humbly con- 
tent in feeble resignation. The spring of aspiration is 
broken in him. He sees that other men are doing higher 
things, but he gets no sight of that unattainable ideal which 
allures and inspires. A vague sense of failure, a gnawing 
envy, but no noble discontent, 

. . . that bids nor sit nor stand but go! 

I am grown peaceful as old age to-night. 
I regret little, I would change still less. 
Since there my past life lies, why alter it? 

No doubt, there's something strikes a balance, 

. . . What would one have ? 
In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance — 

So fades the soul that had the painter's cunning hand but 
not the artist's yearning heart. 

Similarly in his own art. Browning was always inclined 
to rank the poet's work, not by the perfection of its form, 
but by the power of its spirit. Shelley was the one whom, 
of all modern poets, he unquestionably admired most. It 
was Shelley's poetry that had first set his heart on fire, in 
those early days of the twenties when Shelley was exile and 
outcast. Browning never forgot that night, — a soft May 
night it was, he used to say, and two nightingales from the 



332 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

boskage of a garden hard by were striving with each other 
in song, — when he first turned over the leaves of that price- 
less shabby first edition of Shelley, Epipsychidion, Alastor, 
Adonais; a-tremble all night over those pages in which the 
most thrilling of poets lays bare his soul. In that night 
Browning's muse took possession of him. In his very first 
volume, Pauline, he apostrophizes Shelley with a fine rap- 
ture, and to the end of his days Shelley was for him the 
most fascinating of poets. Yet he never approved any of 
Shelley's most characteristic opinions; he never shared 
Shelley's bitter distrust of all existing institutions, or sym- 
pathized with that doctrinaire revolutionary temper of 
which Shelley is our best poetical representative. Nor do I 
think he was enthralled, as so many have been and ever 
will be, by the piercing sweetness of Shelley's verse, where 
poetry subtly passes into purest music. It was rather the 
power of concentrated enthusiasm in Shelley that captivated 
Browning. He loved Shelley because Shelley more than any 
other poet seems an embodied aspiration, a pure flame of de- 
sire. Browning could forget everything else for that. 
Those of you who are confirmed Browning lovers and have 
read the Parleyings will remember his parley with old Chris- 
topher Smart whom, says Sam Johnson, they call mad be- 
cause he wants to pray with everybody and has a dislike for 
clean linen. But this poor creature, whose only poem — 
amid acres of rubbish — was scratched with a key on the 
wall of his madhouse cell, Browning deliberately ranks with 
Milton and Keats because, though his art was bungling and 
his mind crazed, he and he alone between Milton and Keats 

pierced the screen 
'Twixt thing and word, lit language straight from soul, — 

, . . . shapely or uncouth, 
Fire-suffused through and through, one blaze of truth. 

It would be hard to find more extreme proof that in Brown- 
ing's artistic verdicts the form counts for nothing and the 
spirit for everything. 

It will occur to many readers of Browning that had he 



BROWNING 333 

been less indifferent to artistic workmanship, it might have 
been better for his own verse. As it is, he always seemed 
fearful that the divine afflatus might vanish in the painful 
delays of composition. This, I think, is one reason of 
his haste, his disjointed structure, his prosaic diction. He 
dared not stay to cull and order his phrase for fear his 
thought might cool before he could get it into shape. 

Browning's strenuous insistence on the spirit of ideal 
aspiration as the only element of value in art is, at all events, 
a most healthy antidote to the modern cant about art for 
art's sake. They tell us nowadays sometimes that we must 
divorce our ethics and our esthetics. We have no right, so 
the critics say, to ask or even to think about the moral signifi- 
cance of our painting or our poem; is it beautiful, is it well 
wrought? — these are the only relevant questions. Well, it is 
quite possible to divorce your ethical sense from your aestheti- 
cal; that is true enough. Browning knew that. You may 
be sure he hadn't filled himself with the history of Italian 
art without making the acquaintance of many a man of 
cunning skill and nicest taste who was nevertheless a born 
child of the devil, and all his lifetime wrought the will of 
his father. But Browning insists that such a man is never 
the true artist, rather the fine artisan, craftsman, or most 
likely only the connoisseur. Among Browning's men and 
women there are several most remarkable specimens of this 
type of character. Take the Bishop who is ordering his 
tomb at St. Praxed's, for instance. The dying old prelate 
hardly seems to have any soul left worth the saving; no 
reverence, no affection; no thought of righteousness or judg- 
ment to come; only a feverish apprehension that he may be 
cheated of his tomb at last, and a gloating, luxurious sense 
of that rich artistry he hopes to lay his clay under : 

And I shall fill my slab of basalt there, 
And 'neath my tabernacle take my rest, 
With those nine columns round me, two and two, 

Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe 
As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse. 



334 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli. 

Big as a Jew's head cut off at the nape, 

Blue as a vein o'er the Madonna's breast . . . 

So, let the blue lump poise between my knees, 
Like God the Father's globe on both his hands 
Ye worship in the Jesu Church so gay. 

Swift as a weaver's shuttle fleet our years: 
Man goeth to the grave, and where is he? 
Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black — 
'T was ever antique-black I meant! 

Perhaps a still better example of the same type of character 
is that Duke of Ferrara who, while negotiating with an 
envoy for the hand of a new Duchess, dwells with the con- 
noisseur's fine relish upon the excellent picture of his last 
one. It is one of the best specimens of the dramatic mono- 
logue. With wonderful skill. Browning, in these few lines, 
makes this Duke reveal his whole character, — his polished 
and faultless courtesy, his exquisite tastes, and his cold, hard 
heart: 

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall. 
Looking as if she were alive. I call 
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf's hands 
Worked busily a day, and there she stands. 
Will 't please you sit and look at her? I said 
"Fra Pandolf" by design, for never read 
Strangers like you that pictured countenance, 
The depth and passion of its earnest glance. 
But to myself they turned (since none puts by 
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I) 
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst. 
How such a glance came there; so, not the first 
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 'twas not 
Her husband's presence only, called that spot 
Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps 
Fra Pandolf chanced to say, "Her mantle laps 
Over my lady's wrist too much," or "Paint 
Must never hope to reproduce the faint 
Half-flush that dies along her throat:" such stuff 
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough 
For calling up that spot of joy. She had 
A heart — how shall I say? — too soon made glad, 



BROWNING 335 

Too easily impressed: she liked whate'er 

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere. 

Sir, 'twas all one! My favor at her breast. 

The dropping of the daylight in the West, 

The bough of cherries some officious fool 

Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule 

She rode with round the terrace — all and each 

Would draw from her alike the approving speech, 

Or blush, at least. She thanked men, — good ! but thanked 

Somehow — I know not how — as if she ranked 

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name 

With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame 

This sort of trifling? Even had you skill 

In speech — (which I have not) — to make your will 

Quite clear to such an one, and say, "Just this 

Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss, 

Or there exceed the mark" — and if she let 

Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set 

Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse, 

— E'en then would be some stooping ; and I choose 

Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt. 

Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without 

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; 

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands 

As if alive. Will 't please you rise? We'll meet 

The company below, then. I repeat. 

The Count your master's known munificence 

Is ample warrant that no just pretence 

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed ; 

Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed 

At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go 

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though, 

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity. 

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me ! 

So true is it that the hardest heart may take the finest polish. 
There is surely no gospel in art so long as art is thought 
of thus, as a means to tickle the senses or to embellish the 
mere outside of life. But if art be, as I have said Browning 
always conceives it, the expression of individual striving 
after spiritual Ideals, then It as surely has a power to purify 
and uplift. It stimulates those desires that are the spring 
of noble living. Nay, In Its highest reaches It gives us 
glimpses Into the Infinite ; It fascinates us with larger vision 



336 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

and diviner beauty than of earth, until the yearning of the 
artist passes insensibly into religious longing and hope. Shall 
there not be endless room for aspiration? The desires that 
earth is too strait for, shall they not find otherwhere their 
goal? That is the thought of the noblest of Browning's 
poems of art, the Aht Vogler. Abt Vogler has been playing 
upon his orchestration, rapt into an ecstasy of lonely wonder 
and awe at the structure of sound he has reared. It is only 
sound, to be sure, the world is full of such, loud and soft, 
high and low, that is all: but as its harmonies grew and 
thickened, what meanings it seemed to reveal; how its pas- 
sion climbed to heaven, 

And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the 
earth, 
As the earth had done her best, in my passion, to scale the sky : 

till, for a time, the bonds of this earthly life seemed loosed, 
"there was no more near nor far," — and the entranced 
player seemed in some divine companionship whether in the 
body or out of the body he knew not — 

All through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my soul, 
All through my soul that praised as its wish flowed visibly forth, 
All through music and me ! 

Or say, rather, 

here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can, 
Existent behind all laws. 

But as his musing fingers desert the keys, it fades away, as 
all good things of earth do. It was a glimpse only, a star, 
one moment's shine of heaven. "Gone, and the good tears 
start." For why must our bright moments be fleeting, un- 
certain, varied, when our natures cry out, God knows, for 
the certain and enduring, "for the same, same self, same 
love, same God"? 

Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name? 

Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands! 
What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same? 

Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands? 



BROWNING 337 

There shall never be one lost good ! What was, shall live as before ; 

The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound ; 
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more; 

On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round. 

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist ; 

Not its semblance, but itself ; no beauty, nor good, nor power 
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist 

When eternity affirms the conception of an hour. 
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, 

The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, 
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard ; 

Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by and by. 

Thus do the highest imaginings of art blend into that pure 
flame of aspiration that burns and trembles up to God. 



II 

In 1845 there was living — nay, It seemed likely slowly 
dying — in a darkened room of her father's house In London, 
a delicate, fragile woman. "A slight figure," says Miss 
Mitford, who knew her well In those years, "with a shower 
of dark curls falling on each side of a most expressive face, 
large tender eyes richly fringed by dark lashes, and a smile 
like a sunbeam." Fame had already come to her, but love 
had kept aloof. Her father was a well-meaning, hard, hide- 
bound man. Her mother had long been dead. Her only 
brother, her only near friend, she had seen drown before 
her eyes. She seemed left alone, and though always keenly 
alive in spirit, yet fading slowly out of the world. It was 
at the door of this house. No. 50 WImpole Street, that 
Robert Browning, Introduced by his friend John Kenyon, 
knocked one evening early in that year 1845 to meet for 
the first time Elizabeth Barrett. Their poetry had made 
them known to each other before; for Miss Barrett had 
already written Lady Geraldine's Courtship, and the Rhyme 
of the Duchess May, and The Cry of the Children, and some 
half a score more of lyrics that the world Is likely to remem- 
ber; while Robert Browning had already written Pippa 



338 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Passes, and the first part of Saul, and Evelyn Hope, and 
all the rest of those pomegranates, 

which, if cut deep down the middle, 
Show a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity. 

But at this first meeting their mutual interest and admiration 
passed instantly into love, — the love of two strongly con- 
trasted, complementary natures, — the love of the most ro- 
bust and virile of poets for the most delicate, sensitive, 
spiritual. 

What followed, all the world — so far as the world was 
ever allowed to know it — knows very well. On the twelfth 
of September of the following year Robert Browning and 
Elizabeth Barrett stepped into Marylebone Church by them- 
selves and were married, — so quietly that even their best 
friends did not hear of it for some time afterwards, — and a 
few days later they started for Italy and life. Before that 
new joy, Death, whose summoning finger had almost been 
laid upon that woman's pulses, drew back abashed. Love 
brought her health, and knowledge, and song. It was in 
Pisa that she first showed her husband the manuscript of 
that series of poems in which the solemn and sanctifying joy 
that had dawned upon her life found its expression, those 
Sonnets from the Portuguese, as she chose to call them, 
which, I think, in their intensity of emotion and in a certain 
melodious largeness of utterance may challenge comparison 
with any cycle of sonnets since Shakespeare's, — poems such 
as none but a woman could have written, and no other 
woman has written: 

My own Beloved, who hast lifted me 
From this drear flat of earth where I was thrown. 
And, in betwixt the languid ringlets, blown 
A life-breath, till the forehead hopefully 
Shines out again, as all the angels see, 
Before thy saving kiss! My own, my own. 
Who earnest to me when the world was gone. 
And I who looked for only God, found thee! 
I find thee; I am safe, and strong, and glad. 
As one who stands in dewless asphodel 



BROWNING 339 

Looks backward on the tedious time he had 
In the upper life, — so I, with bosom-swell, 
Make witness, here, between the good and bad. 
That Love, as strong as Death, retrieves as well. 

Yet this is the verse of no clinging weakling; but of a woman 
who could sing, in the same years, and in strains equally 
inspired, the sacred joy of wedded love and the high ardors 
of a militant nature. 

The dearest poet I ever knew, — 
Dearest, and greatest, and best to me, 

said Robert Browning, twenty years after she was gone 
from his side. 

But nothing either husband or wife could ever write was 
half so perfect a poem as that wedded life of fifteen years 
in Italy. What house is enshrined in more sacred memories 
than that Casa Guidi, from the balcony of which on that 
still summer night, when flame fell silently from cloud to 
cloud, Robert Browning leaned musing to see the tragedy 
of The Ring and the Book act itself again before his inner 
eye; that house in front of which Elizabeth Barrett Brown- 
ing heard the little child go singing past, "O bella Liberta, 
O bella" ; the house in which, so many an evening, the hus- 
band watched his wife 

Reading by fire-light, that great brow 

And the spirit-small hand propping it. 
Mutely, my heart knows how — 

When, if I think but deep enough, 

You are wont to answer, prompt as rhyme. 

That was the ideal marriage. 

Robert Browning was no man to turn his life inside out 
for the world to see, and he addressed only one poem to his 
wife in her lifetime, I believe; but I sometimes think that 
one, the epilogue to Men and Women, is the most perfect 
poem of husband to wife in our language; his love has such 
manly reticence, such solemn sense of a sacred inner life 
which the stranger intermeddleth not with, and which may 
not utter itself in speech ; 



340 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

What were seen? None knows, none ever shall know. 

Only this is sure — the sight were other, 

Not the moon's same side, born late in Florence, 

Dying now impoverished here in London. 

God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures 

Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, 

One to show a woman when he loves her! 

This I say of me, but think of you, Love! 

This to you — yourself my moon of poets! 

Ah, but that's the world's side, there's the wonder. 

Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you I 

There, in turn I stand with them and praise you — 

Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it. 

But the best is when I glide from out them. 

Cross a step or two of dubious twilight, 

Come out on the other side, the novel 

Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of, 

Where I hush and bless myself with silence. 

Oh, their Rafael of the dear Madonnas, 
Oh, their Dante of the dread Inferno, 
Wrote one song — and in my brain I sing it, 
Drew one angel — borne, see, on my bosom! 

And after that June morning of 1861 when the soul of 
Elizabeth Barrett Browning took sanctuary within the blue, 
her husband never gave a volume to the world but that 
somewhere in its pages, often in phrases so veiled that only 
those who knew him could read it, might be found some 
utterance of his unchanging love, some assured belief that 
bridges "the distance and the dark" : 

Hold on, hope hard in the subtle thing 

That's spirit; though cloistered fast, soar free; 

Account as wood, brick, stone, this ring 

Of the rueful neighbors, and — forth to thee! 

Now this man, thus love-learned, ought surely to have 
written us good love poetry, — and he did; the deepest, 
truest, most passionate, and most pure. It is true, indeed, 
that Browning's love poetry is not exactly the article usually 
supplied us under that name. Ordinary love verse, like 
whatsoever else belongs to the spring time of life, is usually 



BROWNING 341 

a pretty enough thing. Far be it from me to depreciate it — 
to depreciate it would be to forget Burns and youth and 
morning. If philosophy ever quite takes out of us the liking 
for such poetry as O, my luve is like a red, red rose, why the 
blood of the race will be getting thin and the hearts of us 
mostly changing into gray brain matter. But we shall have 
to admit that this kind of verse has an especial charm for 
the unriper seasons of life. The poetic raptures of Brown 
to Chloris, with which we all feel doubtless some thrill of 
present or recollected sympathy, are liable to seem a little 
out of date when Chloris has become plain Mrs, Brown, 
undoubtedly stouter than she used to be, and with a son 
just entering college. And this love which, as Laertes says, 
is but a violet in the youth of primy nature, though it makes 
the world go round, — and the circulating libraries, — is yet 
hardly the stuff out of which the greatest literature is made. 
Now in Browning's books this mere youthful passion, 
all fire and dew, is very seldom found. The people in 
Browning's books have usually attained their majority. We 
shall not forget that when Robert Browning first met Eliza- 
beth Barrett he was thirty-three years of age, and she was 
thirty-nine. Keats in one of his later sonnets mourns that 
he may no more have "relish in the faery power of unre- 
flecting love." That is what Browning never had much 
relish of — "the faery power of unreflecting love." If the 
love in his poetry hasn't been deepened and ripened by the 
mellowing years, you will usually find that it has been tested 
by the stress of some supreme trial, or in some way grown 
into the life, got hold upon all the man's powers. Brown- 
ing's lovers are not simply nice young people who haven't 
anything else to do. Love in his verse is not the mere 
sentiment, rather the deep controlling passion, urging Into 
action intellect, emotions, will. There is no poetry more 
intense; but its passion is born not of the flesh but of the 
spirit. His men and women love like immortal souls. Even 
In his lightest, most graceful verse on this theme there is 
always some sense of the depth and sanctity of love, and 
its supreme value in life. Take, for Instance, that charming 



342 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

poem, Love Among the Ruins. Here, for once, there is, 
to be sure, no action, no character, no thought; only a pair 
of lovers alone and happy in the wide, gray, folding twilight. 
Yet how wonderfully the situation intensifies our sympathy 
with their passion. All the wide, age-long desolation about 
them, all the life centuries ago swept into oblivion to make 
room for them, only throws into relief the power and beauty 
of their young love. It is one of Browning's most fascinat- 
ing pictures, I think, and its low tones and still evening 
lights are all a-tremble with emotion : 

Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles 

Miles and miles 
On the solitary pastures where our sheep 

Half- asleep 
Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stop 

As they crop — 
Was the site once of a city great and gay, 

(So they say) 
Of our country's very capital, its prince 

Ages since 
Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far 

Peace or war. 

Now, — the country does not even boast a tree, 

As you see, 
To distinguish slopes of verdure, certain rills 

From the hills 
Intersect and give a name to, (else they run 

Into one,) 
Where the domed and daring palace shot its spires 

Up like fires 
O'er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall 

Bounding all, 
Made of marble, men might march on nor be pressed, 

Twelve abreast. 

And such plenty and perfection, see, of grass 

Never was! 
Such a carpet as, this summer-time, o'erspreads 

And embeds 
Every vestige of the city, guessed alone, 

Stock or stone — 
Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe 

Long ago; 



BROWNING 343 

Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame 

Struck them tame; 
And that glory and that shame alike, the gold 

Bought and sold. 

And I know, while thus the quiet-colored eve 

Smiles to leave 
To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece 

In such peace, 
And the slopes and rills in undistinguished gray 

Melt away — 
That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair 

Waits me there 
In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul 

For the goal, 
When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb 

Till I come. 

In one year they sent a million fighters forth 

South and North, 
And they built their gods a brazen pillar high 

As the sky. 
Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force — 

Gold, of course. 
Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that bums! 

Earth's returns 
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin! 

Shut them in. 
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest! 

Love is best. 

But poems like this are not common in Browning's work. 
More characteristic is the little poem that may be called a 
companion picture to the one I just read, Two in the Cam- 
pagna. Here the two are not young; they are rather hus- 
band and wife, whose love is not a thing of yesterday. And 
the theme of the poem is not their love merely, but rather 
one of the subtle longings born of love, the longing for 
spiritual nearness and union which comes when there fliashes 
upon us, as sometimes for a moment there will, that lone- 
some, almost terrifying sense of the infinite distance separat- 
ing every human soul from every other human soul, — the 
absolute isolation of our personality. It seems so impos- 



344 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

sible after all to get near even those we love the best, into 
whose eyes we look as if indeed we saw the soul there : 

I would I could adopt your will, ' 

See with your eyes, and set my heart 
Beating by yours, .... 

No. I yearn upward, touch you close, 
Then stand away. I kiss your cheek. 

Catch your soul's warmth, — I pluck the rose 
And love it more than tongue can speak — 

Then the good minute goes. 

The waste of restless verdure about them in the Campagna, 
the fitful solitary breeze, the abandon of nature, all seem 
filled with this vague, hopeless desire, 



Infinite passion, and the pain 
Of finite hearts that yearn. 



There are many of Browning's poems that, like this, sug- 
gest, often in an elusive but thrilling way, some spiritual 
desire that love awakens, vague it may be but intense; con- 
jecture of truth else unthought of, wonder, surmise. 

But Browning's best love verse is not a picture of any 
moods, however deep or tender, or of any passing desire 
or yearning; rather it is the exhibition of love as the moving 
power of life, the mightiest of forces to urge man to 
noble ends. Dick Steele once wrote to his Prue, — 
"Madam: It is the hardest thing in the World to 
be in Love and yet attend businesse." I think it 
seems to be so, — in books at all events. Your hero 
of the average novel isn't really good for much until he 
is married, and then he isn't any longer a hero. But in 
Browning's men and women, love really makes life more 
efiicient, and what is better, it makes life broader and more 
generous. Browning's lovers are not shut up in any sweet 
isolation. Truth to say, your ordinary lover — in literature 
if not in life — is a selfish creature. What we call love 
is usually a disguised and embellished form of covetousness; 
which is idolatry, as Scripture saith. It is bent chiefly on 



BROWNING 345 

acquisition. The lover like the lawyer is intent to "win his 
suit." If he does it, he is insufferably complacent; if he 
doesn't, he is worse. Sometimes he is plaintive and senti- 
mental; sometimes he is sulky and Byronic; sometimes he is 
desperate and declamatory, like Tennyson's bumptious lover 
in Locksley Hall; sometimes he plucks up a forced and de- 
fiant cheerfulness. 

If of herself she will not love, 
Nothing can make her: 
The devil take her! 

But in any case it is evident that his affection has been pretty 
largely alloyed by selfish desire, — 

If she think not well of me, 
What care I how fair she be? 

Not so sing Mr. Browning's lovers. Their love is an un- 
selfish, spiritual passion, and as such is its own reward. It 
means entire self-sacrifice, not so much to a person, as to 
an ideal. If it be returned, well; if not, why still it is better 
to have had the soul uplifted and its vision opened by a gen- 
erous affection than to have lived without it. Browning's 
rejected suitors never mope or rail. 

In that charming drama, Colombe's Birthday, the lover, 
Valence, plain advocate of Cleves, has for a little space 
deemed it not impossible that he might win the hand of the 
Duchess, Colombe; but resigns his hope of it to his rival 
because, as it seems, the interest of the lady demands such 
sacrifice. He is speaking, you remember, to that rival, and 
the Duchess stands by 

Had I seen such an one, 
As I loved her — weighing thoroughly that word — 
So should my task be to evolve her love: 
If for myself ! — if for another — well. 

Says his rival : 

Heroic truly! And your sole reward, — 
The secret pride in yielding up love's right? 



346 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 
And Valence replies : 

Who thought upon reward? And yet how much 

Comes after — oh, what amplest recompense! 

Is the knowledge of her, naught? the memory, naught? 

— Lady, should such an one have looked on you, 

Ne'er wrong yourself so far as quote the world 

And say, love can go unrequited here! 

You will have blessed him to his whole life's end — 

Low passions hindered, baser cares kept back, 

All goodness cherished where you dwelt — and dwell. 

What would he have? He holds you — ^you, both form 

And mind, in his, — where self-love makes such room 

For love of you, he would not serve you now 

The vulgar way, — repulse your enemies. 

Win you new realms, or best, to save the old 

Die blissfully — that's past so long ago! 

He wishes you no need, thought, care of him — 

Your good, by any means, himself unseen, 

Away, forgotten ! — He gives that life's task up. 

No wonder that in the light of this noble devotion the 
Duchess can read her own heart; and as Valence turns to 
retire asking only a withered bunch of flowers she wore, 
she falls into his arms : 

I take him — give up Juliers and the world. 
This is my Birthday. 

If 1 were a woman, I should pronounce Browning's lovers 
the most manly specimens of their class. 

It is evident to any student that Browning's ideal life 
was not one of prudent control and self-restraint, but rather 
one of strenuous impassioned aspiration and endeavor; 
and that he sometimes seems a little over-indulgent of pas- 
sion and impulse because he knew that only in passion and 
impulse can such a life find motive power. He knew that 
the one great beneficent power that must be behind all 
noblest effort is love — not the self-seeking sentiment, but the 
self-renouncing, aspiring passion; love for woman, or for 
man, or for God. Without love of some sort, a life at 
once strenuous and unselfish is impossible. To miss it, 



BROWNING 347 

therefore, "for whatsoever other gain," is to lose the one 
supreme motive of life. 

"It once might have been, once only," says the woman 
who looks back to the early years when both she and the 
man who should have been her lover slighted love for art. 
The years have brought what folks call success, but 

Each life unfulfilled, you see; 

It hangs still, patchy and scrappy: 
We have not sighed deep, laughed free, 

Starved, feasted, despaired, — been happy. 

And nobody calls you a dunce. 

And people suppose me clever: 
This could but have hapi>ened once. 

And we missed it, lost it forever. 

Browning is not here encouraging the precipitancy of callow, 
juvenile sentiment; but deliberately to smother a generous 
affection at the bidding of selfish prudence or convention, 
that does seem to him the most irretrievable error of life. 
And to a man of his temperament it was inevitable that 
such an error should seem not only most irretrievable but 
most dangerous. One of his most significant short poems 
he calls Le Byron de Nos Jours, and the Byron of our days, 
Browning would say, is not the man who flings the reins 
upon the neck of his appetites, but the wary, prudent old 
French academician, "famed for verse and worse," who 
has shut his heart against the one spontaneous impulse to a 
generous affection that ever knocked there, and so has turned 
over to the world, the flesh, and the devil, not only himself 
and the woman he ought to have loved, but two souls more, 
linked with theirs. "This you call wisdom?" says the 
woman years after, — 

The devil laughed at you in his sleeve! 

You knew not? That I well believe; 
Or you had saved two souls: nay, four. 

For Stephanie sprained last night her wrist, 
Ankle or something. "Pooh," cry you? 

At any rate she danced, all say. 
Vilely; her vogue has had its day. 

Here comes my husband from his whist. 



348 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

And who shall deny that to have had the soul emancipated 
and inspired by the pure ardors of some unselfish devotion, 
even though at cost of all life's ease and honors, nay even 
at cost of life itself, is better than to prolong that life 
into cheerless years unwarmed and unuplifted by any gen- 
erous passion. Such I am sure must be the verdict of every 
one who loves his Browning. 

No other modern English poet has rendered with such 
intensity the spiritual power of a great passion. Take 
Caponsacchi and Pompilia in The Ring and the Book. 
The Ring and the Book is too long, the critics say; and 
I suppose it is, — longer than all Homer, I believe. The 
worst of which is, people get frightened and won't read 
it. But there is fire enough in Browning to glow all 
through it. And if you will read it, read it from 
the beginning; see the tragedy slowly reveal itself side 
after side: listen to the buzzing rumor of Rome about 
the story of it; slowly disentangle the truth from that close 
web of treachery and deceit; watch the desperate struggle 
of Pompilia, like some poor dazed and prisoned creature, to 
escape from the damnable villainies woven about her by her 
husband; see how every circumstance seems to conspire to 
make escape impossible, and the very effort to escape seem 
a crime; then see how a kind God shows to each other this 
suffering child-woman, Pompilia, and her rescuer, the noble 
soldier-priest, Caponsacchi, — each to the other like a vision 
of deliverance sent out of heaven, deliverance not indeed 
from the pains and ills of life, not even from cruel death, 
but to the woman strong deliverance out of shame and strife 
into the calm when, for some space before she dies, she may 
learn what life is for and what God's love is like; to the 
priest, sudden deliverance from a life of frivolities and hy- 
pocrisies into a higher realm where he can recognize the 
clear voice of God, see through all conventions and mislead- 
ing appearances what is his real duty as priest of the Most 
High, and so leap to do it, flinging himself upon that God 

Who reigns and rules out of this low world, — 



BROWNING 349 

read all this, and then say whether Robert Browning did not 
know the spiritual power and uplift of love I 

Browning has written nothing more profound and subtle 
than his picture of the conflict of emotions in the priest, 
Caponsacchi, which are born of his love for the tortured, 
shamed, murdered wife and mother, Pompilia. Never was 
love more tender or more impassioned; his burning defense 
of her before the judge shows that; his reverent cherish- 
ing of the broken words that fell from her lips in that night 
of their escape, his agony at the thought that, after all, his 
efforts were unavailing to save her from the dagger of her 
husband : 

I thought I had saved her . . . 

It seems I simply sent her to her death. 

No, Sirs, I cannot have the lady dead ! 

That erect form, flashing brow, fulgurant eye, 

That voice immortal (oh, that voice of hers!) 

I told you, — at one little roadside-place 

I spent a good half-hour, paced to and fro 

The garden; just to leave her free awhile, 

I plucked a handful of Spring herb and bloom : 

I might have sat beside her on the bench 

Where the children were: I wish the thing had been. 

Indeed : the event could not be worse, you know : 

One more half-hour of her saved! She's dead now. Sirs! 

This is love, if anything ever was — that reverent love which 
is the beauty at the heart of men's adoration of the Virgin; 
but it is so different from that earthlier, self-seeking thing 
which often wears the name, no wonder Caponsacchi cries 

You know this is not love. Sirs, — it is faith. 
The feeling that there's God. 

For, in truth, such utter self-denying passion as Caponsacchi 
implies some faith in a Divine Power that has made us cap- 
able of it. It has taught Caponsacchi that love is the source 
of all best duty; shown him, as he says, that 



350 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Life and death 
Are means to an end, that passion uses both, 
Indisputably mistress of the man 
Whose form of worship is self-sacrifice. 

And Pompilia, pale wayside flower that yet all tempests 
cannot crush, more wonderful still is the exhibition of what 
love hath done for her. I hardly remember in our litera- 
ture such another picture of the terrible calm power of simple 
innocence, and of the wisdom that lies in those pure instincts 
God has put into a woman's heart. This child woman has 
learned to suffer, and she has learned, too, when suffering 
meant shame, no longer to suffer but thenceforth to fight : 
and then, just at the close of her short, starved life, by 
God's good grace, love has come to her. All love — the 
love that sanctifies the pangs and joys of motherhood: 

Nobody did me one disservice more, 

Spoke coldly or looked strangely, broke the love 

I lay in the arms of, till my boy was born, 

Born all in love, with nought to spoil the bliss 

A whole long fortnight: in a life like mine 

A fortnight filled with bliss is long and much. 

All women are not mothers of a boy, 

Though they live twice the length of my whole life, 

And, as they fancy, happily all the same. 

There I lay, then, all my great fortnight long, 

As if it would continue, broaden out 

Happily more and more, and lead to heaven: 

Christmas before me, — was not that a chance? 

I never realized God's birth before — 

How He grew likest God in being born. 

This time I felt like Mary, had my babe 

Lying a little on my breast like hers. 

Beneath that benediction she can have a dying word of ex- 
cuse even for her murderous husband, — the father of her 
babe: 

So he was made; he nowise made himself: 
I could not love him, but his mother did. 

But her love for Caponsacchi, her angel of deliverance, that 
is strength and wisdom and trust to her, God's best gift 
never to be disavowed: 



BROWNING 351 

And this man, men call sinner ? Jesus Christ ! 

Of whom men said, with mouths Thyself mad'st once, 

"He hath a devil" — say he was Thy saint. 

My Caponsacchi! Shield and show — unshroud 

In Thine own time the glory of the soul 

If aught obscure, — if ink-spot, from vile pens 

Scribbling a charge against him — (I was glad 

Then, for the first time, that I could not write) — 

Flirted his way, have flecked the blaze ! 

For me, 
'Tis otherwise : let men take, sift my thoughts 
— ^Thoughts I throw like the flax for sun to bleach I 
I did pray, do pray, in the prayer shall die, 
"Oh, to have Caponsacchi for my guide!" 
Ever the face upturned to mine, the hand 
Holding my hand across the world, — a sense 
That reads, as only such can read, the mark 
God sets on woman, signifying so 
She should — shall peradventure — be divine. 

And if Caponsacchi calls his love faith, much more may 
Pompilia give that name to hers. This sunburst at set 
of her stormy day is but a gleam of that larger Divine 
Love in whom we may trust and fear no evil. Her babe, 
her soldier-priest, Pompilia's new love has taught her how 
they both are in the keeping of a higher, tenderer care 
than hers. Her dying words show that : 

Weak souls, how we endeavor to be strong ! 

Shall not God stoop the kindlier to his work, 
His marvel of creation, foot would crush, 
Now that the hand he trusted to receive 
And hold it, lets the treasure fall perforce? 
The better; he shall have in orphanage 
His own way all the clearlier: if my babe 
Outlived the hour — and he has lived two weeks — 
It is through God who knows I am not by. 
Who is it makes the soft gold hair turn black. 
And sets the tongue, might lie so long at rest, 
Trying to talk? Let us leave God alone! 
Why should I doubt he will explain in time 
What I feel now, but fail to find the words? 



352 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

No, nowhere in English poetry since Shakespeare let fall the 
pen with which he had written the last of his tragedies, 
do I find anything that can so purify the soul by pity and 
terror; nay, not even in Shakespeare do I find anything that 
can so uplift the soul with the assurance of a kinship be- 
tween our human love and that which is divine, as can this 
story of Pompilia and Caponsacchi. 

Ill 

Thus may we see that in Browning's thought, art and 
love, like all other forms of aspiration, pass up into religion. 
So must it be with almost all great poetry. For if poetry 
is a picture of life it cannot leave out that department of 
life to which, more than to any other, belong wonder and 
desire and hope. Certainly in the nineteenth century all 
English poets of the first order — save perhaps Keats — 
concerned themselves, in one way or another, with "man's 
religious beliefs and longings. 

But I am inclined to think Robert Browning in many re- 
spects the most prominently and positively Christian poet 
of the last generation. And this not principally because 
he was an avowed believer in some formulated creed — 
though he was gratifyingly orthodox in that direction, a 
good Presbyterian deacon of the Scotch Free Church in 
Florence and passing about the plate for the alms every 
Sunday — but I call him our great Christian poet rather be- 
cause he held all his life, in spite of all the doubts and ques- 
tionings of his age — of which he was by no means ignorant 
— a healthy, robust, hopeful faith in the great essentials of 
Christianity. He is uttering his own credo when he makes 
the dying John say: 

the acknowledgment of God in Christ 
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 
All questions in the earth and out of it, 
And has so far advanced thee to be wise. 

That indicates not only what he believes, but why he believesr 
it. For Browning's faith was based not so much upon ex- 



BROWNING 353 

ternal or historical evidence as upon a profound internal 
conviction of the fitness of the Christian revelation to our 
deepest needs. 

I have said that he was the poet not of man, but of in- 
dividual men ; and moreover that he loved all forms of pro- 
nounced and aggressive personality, in which the human life 
is at the full. This yearning, restless soul of ours, surely 
we know that at least, each for himself, and none but a 
fool will ask for proof: 

Quoth a young Sadducee 

"Reader of many rolls, 
Is it so certain we: 

Have, as they tell us, souls?" 

"Son, there is no reply!" 

The Rabbi bit his beard : 
"Certain a soul have / — 

JVe may have none," he sneered. 

And what mean the endless longings and aspirations of 
this soul when it most truly lives; its spurnings of every step 
on which it climbs to some yet higher idea? That all this 
means nothing; that the spark which disturbs our clod flick- 
ers out and falls into our mortal dust; that the ideal which 
shines beyond our highest aspiring is only an illusion that 
mocks and fades; that there is no wider scene, no higher 
justice : this is intolerable. Must it not rather be that we 
were meant to hear some diviner voice saying, 

'Wherefore did I create for thee that ear 
Hungry for music, and direct thine eye 
To where I hold a seven-stringed instrument, 
Unless I meant thee to beseech me play?* 

The argument is old; but few men can feel its con- 
vincing power as a man of Browning's intensity and fullness 
of life must feel it. He has drawn it out repeatedly in his 
later work, as in Ferishtah's Fancies (whence the lines just 
quoted are taken) and in La Saisiaz; and I think still better 
in those earlier poems in which the conclusion is dramatically 
implied without so much array of logical process — in that 



354 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

touching and truthful poem, Cleon, for instance. Cleon, the 
pagan poet, who has written the epos on a hundred plates 
of gold, and the little chant so sure to rise from every 
fishing bark when seamen haul the net, Cleon, sculptor, 
painter, philosopher, writes to answer the question of King 
Protus whether he have not attained the proper end of life, 
and how, therefore, 

now life closeth up, 
I face death with success in my right hand. 

The burden of his yearning answer is that every access 
of knowledge and power, every advance above the perfect 
animal life only deepens the soul's despair; to know our own 
infinite powers and infinite desires, while we know that to- 
morrow we are not, — what joy is that? We climb the 
heights of knowledge only to perish the lonelier there. 

And the suggestion of Protus that the poet has an im- 
mortality in his works, and thus really lives in the thoughts 
of men to be, — that fiction of an immortality of influence 
that our modern positivists juggle with, the hope to "join 
the choir invisible, whose music is the gladness of the 
world," — this sorry substitute for our warm, personal life, 
Cleon sadly puts aside as every man who sees straight 
and speaks truth must: 

"But," sayest thou — (and I marvel, I repeat, 
To find thee trip on such a mere word) — "what 
Thou writest, paintest, stays; that does not die: 
Sappho survives, because we sing her songs, 
And iEschylus, because we read his plays!" 
Why, if they live still, let them come and take 
Thy slave in my despite, drink, from thy cup, 
Speak in my place. Thou diest while I survive ? 
Say rather that m> fate is deadlier still. 
In this, that every day my sense of joy 
Grows more acute, my soul (intensified 
By power and insight) more enlarged, more keen; 
While every day my hairs fall more and more. 
My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase — 
The horror quickening still from year to year. 
The consummation coming past escape, 



BROWNING 355 

When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy — 

When all my works wherein I prove my worth, 

Being present still to mock me in men's mouths, 

Alive still, in the phrase of such as thou, 

I, I the feeling, thinking, acting man. 

The man who loved his life so over-much. 

Sleep in my urn. It is so horrible, 

I dare at times imagine to my need 

Some future state revealed to us by Zeus, 

Unlimited in capability 

For joy, as this is in desire for joy. 

Browning's own conclusion is clear. He does not, as 
some of his critics charge, fall into the error of claiming 
that the desire for immortality is itself proof enough of 
immortality. 

Zeus has not yet revealed it ; and alas. 
He must have done so, were it possible, 

sighs the pagan. Nay, God has revealed it, says the Chris- 
tian, and the heart God hath made leaps to accept the revela- 
tion God hath given. 

More convincing still to Browning's thought as a proof 
of the truth and divinity of the Christian revelation is its 
power to meet the demand of our human soul for love. 
Love we know to be the highest thing in us. Nay, no power 
however mighty, no wisdom however infinite can be so high 
a thing as love — 

the loving worm within its clod 
Were diviner than a loveless god 
Amid his worlds, I will dare to say. 

But where is the proof of that larger, diviner love? In 
the world about us with its imperfection, its evil, its violence? 
Or even in the wondrous mechanism of the Universe? Nay; 
Power there, and Wisdom, but not Love, or at best love 
veiled and only half seen. Optimist as Browning was, he 
knew that the world outside us cannot reveal a loving God. 
And yet is it credible that while we are so inferior to the 
Creator in power and wisdom, we should be his superior 



356 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

in love, the divinest attribute of all? Says the good 
old Pope in The Ring and the Book: 

Is there strength there? — enough: intelligence? 

Ample: but goodness in a like degree? 

Not to the human eye in the present state, 

An isoscele deficient in the base. 

What lacks, then, of perfection fit for God 

But just the instance which this tale supplies 

Of love without a limit? 

This argument is implicated in almost all Browning's poems 
on religious subjects, but nowhere does it receive such in- 
spiring statement as in that glorious poem, Saul. Some of 
Browning's later writing on religious themes seems to me 
little better than versified syllogism, swift, subtle, intellect- 
ual, but with too little distinctly poetic charm or inspiration. 
But Saul I think the noblest religious poem of the last half 
century. Its long bounding lines lift us, on wave after wave 
of hope and ardor, up to that closing burst of genuinely 
prophetic rapture where David foresees the Christ to be. 
It is the best expression I know in modern poetry of the 
rapt vision of the seer. And this high assurance is born, 
as I said, of the conviction that the divine love cannot be 
less than the human, and that it must, therefore, some day 
reveal itself more clearly to man. To rouse the desponding 
Saul, David has tried the charm of song, the pride of 
achievement, the radiance of fame, the long hope of praise 
from generations yet to be; but all have sufficed only to 
lift the great king a little out of his mood, and fix his eye 
in placid regard upon the singer. At last Saul slowly 

Lifted up the hand slack at his side, till he laid it with care 

Soft and grave, but in mild settled will, on my brow: through my 

hair 
The large fingers were pushed, and he bent back my head, with kind 

power — 
All my face back, intent to peruse it, as men do a flower. 
Thus held he me there with his great eyes that 

scrutinized mine — 
And oh, all my heart how it loved him ! 



BROWNING 357 

And out of that great love slowly dawns upon David that 
great truth that love implies : 

"In the least things have faith, yet distrust in the greatest of all ? 

Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift, 

That I doubt his own love can compete with it? Here, the parts 

shift? 
Here, the creature surpass the Creator, — the end, what Began? 
Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man, 
And dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet alone can ? 
Would it ever have entered my mind, the bare will, much less power, 
To bestow on this Saul what I sang of, the marvellous dower 
Of the life he was gifted and filled with ? to make such a soul. 
Such a body, and then such an earth for insphering the whole ? 
And doth it not enter my mind (as my warm tears attest) 
These goods things being given, to go on, and give one more, the 

best? 

"I believe it! 'Tis thou, God, that givest.'tis I who receive: 
In the first is the last, in thy will is my power to believe. 
All's one gift : thou canst grant it moreover, as prompt to my prayer 
As I breathe out this breath, as I open these arms to the air. 

Would I suffer for him that I love ? So wouldst thou — so wilt thou ! 
So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown — 

As thy Love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved 

Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being Beloved ! 

He who did most, shall bear most; the strongest shall stand the 

most weak. 
'Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh, that I seek 
In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be 
A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me, 
Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like this hand 
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ 

stand!" 

With this firm grasp on a few great spiritual truths, 
Browning went through life like a crusader. His faith was 
robust and militant. He didn't tie himself up by the de- 
tails of any creed, very likely; but he had the heroic en- 
thusiasm of a great conviction. He is the most valiant of 
poets in the face of life. Nothing could beat down his in- 
vincible optimism. Through all the down-heartedness, the 



358 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

low tone, the temper of question and doubt that mark the 
most serious English poetry of the last half of that century, 
his assurance rings out bold and inspiring. He was not 
ignorant of all the insistent questioning of his time upon the 
deepest themes. Nor did he turn away from it. Indeed, 
especially in his later life he liked to have a grapple with 
some unthrown question of the ages. There was a certain 
defiant quality in him always; he had the fighter's instinctive 
desire to try his mettle. In the face of whatsoever doubt 
he threw the challenge of a fearless faith. Like the hero in 
that wonderfully vivid and suggestive poem, Childe Roland, 
he could say: 

I saw them and I knew them all. And yet 
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, 
And blew. 

I count it not the least of Robert Browning's services 
to humanity that he did so much to reinforce the spiritual 
confidence of his age, to hearten us with the high assurance 
that 

God's in his heaven — 
All's right with the world! 

It was a part of his faith that whatsoever is dark and 
whatsoever hard in this world is only a necessary element of 
that discipline for which we are put here. 

This life is training and a passage — pass, 

says the old Pope in The Ring and the Book. Aspiration, 
progress, this is the condition of healthy life. But were the 
present always fair, the prize always within our grasp, 
how should we aspire? We must have some unrest to push 
us on to better things, — 

This foot once planted on the goal, 
This glory-garland round my soul, 
Could I descry such ? Try and test ! 

Earth being so good, would heaven seem best? 



BROWNING 359 

Nay, we need not only beauty and love to beckon, but pain 
and fear to urge. And wisdom, too, how should we grow in 
that unless goaded by a painful sense of our own ignorance? 
The full day is ever beyond us; but yet a spark disturbs 
our clod. There must be more truth above us; doubt is 
only the rough road by which we climb unto it. "Sorrow is 
hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear" ; but sorrow and 
doubt are only meant to sting us into that noble discontent 
that struggles and aspires. The sorrow greatly endured, 
the doubt valiantly overcome, — so we gain "those wrestling 
thews that throw the world." 

Rather I prize the doubt 
Low kinds exist without, 
Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark. 

Then, welcome each rebuff 

That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! 

Be our joys three-parts pain! 

Strive, and hold cheap the strain ; 
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe! 

Only underneath such a heroic confidence as this there 
must be an unswerving faith in the permanence of our human 
personality, and in the existence of a loving God above us 
all. I must be assured that, whatever my failings and falls, 
my career is not to end in failure to-morrow; but that 
there is somewhere endless room for endless effort. And I 
must be assured that all this restless scheme of things is not 
the sport of chance, but rather under the direction of a Being 
who surpasses us in love as far as is wisdom. These two 
great essential truths, as revealed in Christianity, Browning 
held with unfaltering grasp all his days. The lines of at- 
tack and defense might change ; the scientists might butt at 
Genesis as they did in the fifties and sixties; the German 
critics might hammer away at their historical criticism; he 
wasn't greatly concerned. Like his good Pope, he didn't 
much perplex him with "aught hard, dubious, in the trans- 
mitting of the tale." 



36o AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

"God and his own soul stood sure." At the close of 
that striking, if somewhat difficult, poem. La Saisiaz, speak- 
ing for once in his own person, in his fancy he longs for 
fame — fame in which might unite the powers of all those 
great men who once lived near the lake where he is writ- 
ing, — the wit of Voltaire, the learning of Gibbon, the elo- 
quence of Rousseau, Byron's "rainbow, tears" — and all for 
what? Why that men yet to be might say of him, "He 
there, . . . crowned by verse and prose, ... he at least 
believed in soul, was very sure of God !" 

For himself, he had always the buoyancy, the ardor that 
comes of limitless hope and desire. There's no undertone of 
sadness in him. No dim horizon shut down in front of him. 
More than any other English poet, he exemplifies the mean- 
ing of that wonderful phrase of Scripture, "the power of an 
endless life." Mr. Sharp tells us how in his later years 
he said to him: "Death! It is this harping on Death I de- 
spise so much, this idle and often cowardly as well as ignor- 
ant harping. . . . What fools who talk thus. Why, 
amico mio, you know as well as I that death is life. . . . 
Pshaw I It is foolish to argue upon such a thing even. 
. . . Never say of me that I am dead!" 

He has his wish. We who learned to know the living 
Browning find it impossible ever to think him dead. And 
at the core of his fame will ever lie, I believe, this irrepres- 
sible power of personal life. In the next century men may 
not speak of him as the greatest English poet of his genera- 
tion — it is too soon for us to be sure about that; they surely 
will not speak of him as the greatest artist in verse — that 
fame is Tennyson's; many of his works they will, I think, 
forget to read. But they will remember him as a genius 
of mass and power; as one of the subtlest explorers of the 
human heart, endowed with sinewy intellect, large imagina- 
tion, capacity for enjoyment and appreciation of all forms of 
life, and with a gift of utterance that, if not often flowing 
nor always clear, had immense breadth, pungency, vigor. 
But they will think of him most of all, I believe, as the 
one poet who expressed the robust, unconquerable vigor of 



BROWNING 361 

faith and hope that underlay all the shifting doubt of his 
restless age, the spiritual hero and victor in the poetry of the 
mid-nineteenth century. 

One poem, I think, will always link itself with special 
significance to his memory, — I mean his very last poem, 
which we did not read until after he was gone, — surely one 
of the most striking last poems ever poet wrote. The breath 
of larger life is in it. It is as if the whole poet had summed 
himself up in those noble words of hail and farewell: 

At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time, 

When you set your fancies free, 
Will they pass to where — by death, fools think, imprisoned — 
Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so, 
— Pity me? 

Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken 1 

What had I on earth to do 
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? 
Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel 
— Being — who ? 

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, 

Never doubted clouds would break, 
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, 
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
Sleep to wake. 

No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time 

Greet the unseen with a cheer! 
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, 
"Strive and thrive!" cry "Speed, — fight on, fare ever 
There as here!" 



ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 

AMONG the most potent and beneficent influences in 
England during the decade from 1830 to 1840 were 
the teaching and example of Thomas Arnold, head- 
master of Rugby School. The distinctively intellectual quali- 
fications of Arnold for his work, — his scholarship, his ex- 
ecutive capacity, his stimulating methods of instruction, his 
vivid historical imagination, — all these he himself con- 
sidered subservient to the highest purpose of education: the 
formation of intelligent, independent moral character. His 
famous statement to his boys became the watchword of 
Rugby: "It is not necessary that this should be a school 
of three hundred, or even one hundred, or even of fifty boys ; 
but it is necessary that it should be a school of Christian 
gentlemen." And such he made it. It was not so much 
that he taught religion; rather that all his teaching was 
religious. He was not prone to religious introspection. 
His whole cast of mind was not philosophical or speculative, 
but outward and practical. Impatient of our factitious dis- 
tinctions between sacred and secular things, he thought and 
spoke of religion as duty and service rather than as belief, 
and as binding equally upon all the acts of life. It was in- 
evitable that pupils who passed years under the training of 
such a teacher should imbibe much of his temper. "What 
I want to find in a boy," Arnold used to say, "is moral 
thoughtfulness." It soon came to be noticed that the boys 
of his sixth form had unusual maturity and strength of prac- 
tical judgment, and an unusual sense of the moral quality 
of action. They had not been encouraged to think over- 
much on the grounds of religious belief, or to be constantly 
interrogating their own inner experiences; on the contrary, 
they were interested beyond the wont of boys of their 

362 



ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 363 

years in the affairs of the world outside — political, histori- 
cal — and they had become accustomed to measure all these 
affairs by ethical and religious standards. Accepting im- 
plicitly the great principles of Christian teaching, they 
applied those principles in healthy, outward fashion to con- 
duct. 

In 1837 there were two boys in Rugby who were to 
become poets, and whose poetry was to have a unique value 
as the best expression of an attitude of religious doubt and 
question characteristic of many thoughtful men about the 
middle of the nineteenth century. One of these boys was 
Dr. Arnold's son, Matthew, the other, three years his senior, 
was Arthur Hugh Clough. No pupil ever felt more deeply 
the influence of Arnold than did this young Arthur Clough. 
Not that there was anything priggish or morbid about him. 
He was not only the best scholar in his form, but the best 
goal-keeper in the football field and the best swimmer in 
the river; a buoyant, ambitious, healthy fellow. But there 
are passages in his early letters that show how thoroughly 
he had accepted Arnold's ideals, and how entirely he was 
governed by unselfish moral impulse. "I verily believe," 
he writes a friend, "my whole being is soaked through with 
the wishing and hoping and striving to do the school good." 
He is looking forward to entering one of the universities 
next year, and decides for Oxford partly because there is, 
he learns, a "high Arnold set that is just germinating 
at Balliol under the auspices of Stanley and Lake" (who 
had gone up the year before), but chiefly because he 
thinks he may do more good there. And the possibilities 
of Oxford for good or evil he thinks far greater than those 
of Cambridge. "Suppose," he exclaims, "suppose Oxford 
became truly good and truly wise !" With such ingenuous as- 
pirations, Clough, in 1837, at the age of eighteen, went up to 
the university. But he had not been in Oxford a month 
before he found that the center of influence there was Oriel 
rather than Balliol. The religious tone of the university 
was decided, not by the Rugby set, but by that young fellow 
of Oriel who was preaching every Sunday afternoon in St. 



364 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Mary's Church. More than forty years after, Clough's 
friend, Matthew Arnold, told us of the charm that voice 
had for him: 

Who could resist the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding 
in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary's, rising 
into the pulpit, and then, in the most entrancing of voices, breaking 
the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music, — 
subtle, sweet, mournful? 

It was clear that the spiritual forces of the place were 
swayed by this man, John Henry Newman, and the group 
of his immediate friends and disciples. No young man of 
thoughtful and reverent temper could escape their influence. 
As for Clough, he says that for two years he was like a 
straw drawn up a chimney. But — and here was the fatal 
danger — he could not help seeing that the teaching of these 
men was, in most respects, diametrically opposed to what 
he had learned at Rugby. They counseled obedience, and 
discouraged private opinion. They urged the authority of 
a church, and disparaged the sufficiency of Scripture. The 
whole force of their movement was directed to check those 
liberal tendencies in religion and politics of which Arnold 
was a representative. They thoroughly disliked Arnold; 
and Arnold, though some of them were his intimate 
friends, — Keble was godfather of his son Matthew, — ^yet 
felt with pain that it was impossible to maintain intimate 
relations with them. Clough tried for a while to keep out 
of what he calls "this vortex of philosophism and discus- 
sion"; but for so eager and inquisitive a mind as his that 
was impossible. Like many young men at that time, he 
came to question the validity of his religious beliefs while 
yet he could not assent to any churchly authority as a sub- 
stitute for them. He had no sympathy with the attitude of 
confident denial, — it is probable that he never positively 
repudiated any article of his early faith, — ^but In the strain 
of conflicting opinions and tendencies he found all ground 
of religious certitude slipping away beneath him. His story 
thereafter Is the record of a man who retains In a very high 



ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 365 

degree the Christian temper, but can never, in a life-long 
struggle, quite recover the Christian creed. And his poetry, 
many readers will always hold, is the truest and most moving 
record in our language of such a struggle, — the struggle of a 
noble soul who, in spite of all his doubts and questions, never 
lost courage and hope, because really sustained by an under- 
lying faith in a divine love and purpose at the heart of all 
this unintelligible world. 

Clough was in Oxford eleven years. His attainments 
in scholarship were not, at first, quite what his remarkable 
record at Rugby had led his friends to expect. The tumult 
of opinion in which he found himself involved withdrew his 
attention too much from his studies and he missed one or 
two academic distinctions he had coveted. But in 1842 he 
was elected Fellow of Oriel College, and next year tutor. 
One thing is certain from the scanty records of those 
years, — young Clough was one of the most lovable of men. 
He was not likely, indeed, to attract a large circle of friends, 
partly on account of a certain shyness and reticence, espe- 
cially upon all matters affecting his own experience, and 
partly from the utter frankness and honesty of a nature im- 
patient of the conventionalities and half meanings of casual 
acquaintance; but those who did know him loved him. As 
one of his Oxford friends said, "He had a gift for making 
people personally fond of him; I can use no other word." 
He was a big, broad-shouldered, soft-hearted, utterly un- 
selfish fellow. In one of his vacation tramps through the 
Scottish Highlands he chanced upon a heather-thatched hut 
wherein was a child lying sick of a fever, the father away, 
the mother without medicines or aid for her child, and 
nothing to be had nearer than Fort William, two days' 
journey away. Clough, without a moment's hesitation, 
tramped thither, got medicines and supplies, and returned 
in time to save the child, — four days' hard walk over a 
rough country for a child he had never seen, and whose 
parents did not even learn his name. And it was only by 
accident that any one ever heard of it. That was just like 
him. 



266 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Of his religious perplexities during his Oxford life 
Clough would seem to have said but little to his friends. 
They are recorded in the verses written in those years. 
In all his writing of that period there is no love of 
controversy, not a trace of the pride of opinion, or 
a touch of sarcasm for any honest belief which he can- 
not himself accept. This verse is rather a record 
of a search for truth, eager but reverent; often baffled 
but never impatient or disheartened. He has no liking 
for merely negative and destructive criticism. His atti- 
tude toward the beliefs he cannot accept is always 
that of question, not of denial; and he was ready to 
admit that others might have found truth where he could 
not discover it. In a letter written in 1847, speaking of 
some theories of the Atonement which he cannot under- 
stand, he adds: "I think others are more right who say 
boldly, *We don't understand it, and therefore we won't 
fall down and worship it.' Though there is no occasion for 
adding 'There is nothing in it' I should say, until I know, 
I will wait, and if I am not born with the power to discover, 
I will do what I can with what knowledge I have — trust to 
God's justice, and neither pretend to know, nor, without 
knowing, pretend to embrace ; nor yet oppose those who by 
whatever means are increasing or trying to increase knowl- 
edge." In point of fact, his divergence from recognized 
standards of orthodoxy might not have given any compunc- 
tion to a man of less sensitive conscience in his position; but 
Clough was the soul of honesty, and after 1845 he came to 
feel with increasing uneasiness that only with large latitude 
of interpretation could he make the subscription required 
of a fellow and tutor. Accordingly, in 1848, he resigned 
both positions and with very little notion of what next, 
threw himself upon the world. 

In the same year he published his first long poem. 
Those people who expected to read in it a record of 
his spiritual history must have been much disappointed, 
for it contains nothing of the sort. The Bothie of 
Tober-na-Fuolich, as he called it, is well described in 



ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 367 

its secondary title as a Long-Vacation Pastoral; it is the 
story of a reading party with their tutor in the Scottish 
Highlands. The Bothie seems to lie a little at one side of 
the main current of Clough's poetry; I do not think it his 
most characteristic work. Some critics, however, have 
called it his best; and it very possibly is the one by which 
he himself would have preferred to be judged. It represents 
the side of his nature in which he himself has most confi- 
dence. For we are not to think of Clough as giving himself 
up by choice to brooding introspection. He was always 
suspicious of that habit of mind, even when he could not 
escape from it. He coveted action, open and unreflecting 
enjoyment. There are people who seem to be born with 
eyes that open inward. They are forever on the watch to 
see how their inner experiences are going on, and live with 
one finger always on their spiritual pulse; and they seem to 
take a dubious kind of pleasure in this personal diagnosis. 
But Clough was not a man of that sort. He was, indeed, 
always liable to an over-questioning and hesitant temper; 
but he felt there was something morbid in such a temper, 
from which he strove to escape into a free outward life. 
He did not enjoy that kind of poor health. He was fearful 
lest the healthy glow of action should get sicklied o'er with 
the pale cast of thought. In literature he preferred the 
objective depiction of the outward life — books like Walter 
Scott's — to the analytical study of character and mood. A 
great admirer of Wordsworth, he yet thought Wordsworth 
over-reflective on trifling occasion. He used to say that 
such lines as 

To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears 

were unhealthy, because they implied a detachment from the 
larger interests of mankind. Accordingly, when he wrote 
his first long poem for publication, he turned aside from all 
the questionings that had beset him, and made his poem a 
breezy, open-air story. There is red blood and bracing 
weather in it; tramping, swimming, Highland piping and 



368 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

dancing, and an uncommonly genuine bit of love story to 
end with. The poem is full of the rugged charm of wide, 
heathery moor, misty mountains, bright, cold streams. No 
poet since Scott has so well caught the atmosphere of the 
Highlands. And then — what is rather surprising in pas- 
toral poetry — there are real people in the book. This 
group of college men, with their robust health and jolly, 
lazy vigor, their confident opinions on every subject undei; 
heaven, their merciless good-natured satire, their exuberant 
sentiment each man for himself, and their intolerance of 
sentiment in everybody else, — we have most of us known 
them, and very good fellows they be ! Of the college men 
the foremost is one Philip Hewson, "radical, Chartist, elo- 
quent speaker." Philip is enthusiastic and sentimental, 
qualities rather winning in youth when enthusiasm is in the 
blood and the sentiments are not yet soured. He breaks 
his heart one week over a ferryman's pretty daughter; 
mends it quite naturally the next over an earl's daughter, 
whom he vows to be noble enough to sacrifice a whole gen- 
eration of hodmen for; and a fortnight later does really 
find his fate in the Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich. Bothie is 
Gaelic for a laborer's hut; and in the Bothie of Tober-na- 
Vuolich, 

on the blank hillside looking down through the loch to the ocean 
There, with the runnel beside and pine trees twain before it, 

lived David Mackaye and his daughter Elspie. Elspie is 
one of the living women of modern poetry. She is rustic 
enough to satisfy Philip's democratic views, but she isn't 
ignorant and she has a crisp originality really irresistible. 
Young Alfred Tennyson was writing idyls in those years, 
with some nice girls in them, doubtless; but after his Gar- 
dener's Daughters and Miller's Daughters, with "dainty, 
dainty waists," and "jewels at the ear," this Miss Elspie 
is most refreshingly real. Her canny prudence and delib- 
eration, her Scottish tendency to turn over in her mind the 
proposal of her lover and to have a look at love "in the 
abstract" — it is all quite truthful and quite delightful. The 



ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 369 

Bothie throughout is that rare thing, a modern pastoral 
without a touch of pretty unreality. Civilization is likely 
soon to make such poetry impossible. It is the kind one 
thinks that Clough would always have preferred to write, 
if he could. But, in fact, this active, unquestioning life, 
content with 

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules, 

was never possible to him. He might admire it, but he 
could not live it. And thus the larger part of his verse, and 
the part which has the deepest life in it, comes from the 
skeptical part of his nature. 

That term, "skeptical" is in bad odor; yet in strictness it 
implies no moral quality, but only an intellectual one. 
Minds like Clough find it hard to believe. They are always 
asking themselves hard questions, and they are not satisfied 
with anybody's answers. They cannot put up with merely 
probable conclusions and provisional belief. Most of us, 
if we find ourselves in doubt on any subject, strike a balance 
of probabilities, as well as we can, and act on the conclusion. 
We learn pretty early in life that we are not likely to attain 
a perfectly consistent body of opinions in any field of 
thought, and become shy of laying down any more general 
propositions than we are obliged to. We know that we 
don't know much, but we don't worry about it. It is not 
hypocrisy, we say, this attitude of ours, nor even moral in- 
difference; but rather a healthy recognition of the limita- 
tions of knowledge. We must believe something — at all 
events assent to something — or we cannot get on. We mus|; 
do it; that is the way the world is made. 

But Clough could not live so. It seemed to him a kind 
of dishonesty. He is always protesting against that temper 
of acquiescence which puts by our obstinate questionings 
with answers we know are not quite correct, or gives easy 
acceptance to half-truths as a basis of action : 

O may we for assurance' sake, 
Some arbitrary judgment take. 



370 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

And wilfully pronounce it clear, 
For this or that 'tis we are here? 

Or is it right, and will it do, 
To pace the sad confusion through, 
And say: It doth not yet appear 
What we shall be, what we are here ? 

No man of his generation, I am persuaded, loved truth 
more intensely than Clough did; but precisely because he 
loved it so much he was always fearful that in his eagerness 
he might over-hastily accept something as truth that was 
not true. He knew that there is rest and a certain stability 
given to the mind by accepting steadily anything; and he 
was apprehensive of a temptation to believe merely from 
this motive. It seemed to him fatally easy to substitute a 
languid assent for a living faith, and thus to slide into a 
religion which is mere use and wont, and that that was 
fatal treachery to the soul. Whenever his verse has a 
satiric edge, — as it often has, for he was endowed with 
a humor keen as well as buoyant, — the object of his satire 
is usually that easy-going temper which accepts belief, and 
would accept with equal readiness disbelief, at the dictates 
of prudence or even of fashion; the good people, of whom, 
to say truth, there are too many in the world, who do not 
really fear God but are very much afraid of Mrs. Grundy. 
The great World, in one of his poems, says of thaf 
story of the Christ whom once they slew : 

His wife and daughter must have where to pray, 
And whom to pray to, at the least one day 
In seven, and something sensible to say. 

Whether the fact so many years ago 

Had, or not, happened, how was he to know ? 

Yet he had always heard that it was so. 

Thus to substitute tradition for belief, the voice of form 
and convention for the convincing evidence of truth, this to 
Clough was the worst dishonesty, — dishonesty to one's own 
self. Another result of Clough's habit of insistent question 
was the paralysis it laid upon all efficient activity. And this 



ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 371 

result was most painful to one naturally so eager and gen- 
erous as he. It may be said that action must precede faith, 
and that indeed is true; but such a nature as Clough's finds 
itself forced to ask whether the belief that grows out of 
action is anything more than convenient assent to those 
conditions found essential to action. Have we a right to 
believe anything simply because we cannot act unless we 
do? As the doubter in one of his poems says, 

Action will furnish belief — but will that belief be the true one, 
This is the point, you know. 

It is often said, also, that we must accept with such grace 
as we can the limitations of our knowledge and the impos- 
sibility of assured faith, and then, content with our ignor- 
ance, go on to do our duty. And Clough tried to say that 
too. That is the thought of one of the most beautiful of 
his shorter poems, The Questioning Spirit: 

The human spirits saw I on a day 

Sitting and looking each a different way ; 

And hardly tasking, subtly questioning, 

Another spirit went around the ring 

To each and each : and as he ceased his say, 

Each after each, I heard them singly sing, 

Some querulously high, some softly, sadly low, 

We know not — what avails to know? 

We know not — wherefore need we know? 

This answer gave they still unto his suing, 

We know not, let us do as we are doing. 

Dost thou not know that those things only seem? 

I know not, let me dream my dream. 

Are dust and ashes fit to make a treasure? — 

I know not, let me take my pleasure. 

What shall avail the knowledge thou hast sought? — 

I know not, let me think my thought. 

And, when the rest were over past, 

I know not. I will do my duty, said the last. 

Thy duty do? rejoined the voice. 

Ah, do it, do it, and rejoice; 

But shalt thou then, when all is done. 

Enjoy a love, embrace a beauty 



372 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

Like these, that may be sought and won 
In life, whose course will then be run; 
Or wilt thou be where there is none? 
I know not, I will do my duty. 

Beautiful, indeed, with a sad nobility of resolve, but quite 
hopeless. It is the agnostic theory of life; and it cannot 
give a satisfactory motive for action. For if we cannot tell 
why we should do our duty, if we do not know to whom it 
is due, we may soon find that duty itself comes to be nothing 
more than convention, and the spring of resolve breaks. 
So Clough felt. In a sequel to the poem just quoted he 
sees the human spirits once again, this time on the earth in 
woful case, waiting by some Bethesda for healing from the 
smitings of life. And with them now that one who spoke 
of duty once before, 

Foredone and sick and sadly muttering lay. 

'I know not, I will do — what is it I would say? 

What was that word which once sufficed alone for all, 

Which now I seek in vain and never can recall?' 

And then, as weary of in vain renewing 

His question, thus his mournful thought pursuing, 

'I know not, I must do as other men are doing.' 

But when the human spirit can say only this it is surely 
worsted in the struggle of life. Clough, as I have said, felt 
it a fatal dishonesty to accept tradition or half-belief for 
belief; here, on the practical side, he felt it equally dis- 
honest to accept mere convention for duty. This is the 
skeptic's dilemma. He must act without belief, or on be- 
lief only half supported by evidence; yet, if he does so act, 
his action soon degenerates into routine; while, if he de- 
clines to act, he lets occasion go by and wastes his days in 
querulous inefficiency. 

All Clough's minor poems are the record of his 
struggle with this problem. In them all is the same 
candor, the same generosity, the same buoyant and active 
spirit checked by a mournful hesitation. They have 
the charm of entire sincerity and a certain appealing 
earnestness, and they have high poetic qualities as well. 



ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 373 

For Clough had the native sensibility and the trained judg- 
ment of the artist. It is true that, in general, he seems too 
intent upon his meaning to delay long over his form; he 
likes the plain truth best. Yet in these lyrics of the inner 
life there is a melody and movement all the more effective 
because so unstudied, and an imagination that often sends 
a sudden ray into the subtlest recesses of feeling. And now 
and then we come upon one of them which shows that union 
of perfect grace with utter simplicity which is the last charm 
of lyric verse. The plaintive music of such a poem as The 
Stream of Life sings itself into the heart at once and for- 
ever. 

Two longer poems, the Dipsychus and the Amours 
de Voyage, illustrate the same struggle to escape from the 
alternatives of convention on the one hand and inefficiency 
on the other. Dipsychus is a kind of everyday Faust. The 
hero (whose name means, I suppose, the man with two 
souls) is constantly haunted by a mocking spirit who tempts 
to submit to the inevitable, accept the half-belief and the 
conventional action, and do as other men are doing. This 
is Clough's devil. No grimy and vulgar specter, nor yet 
a handsome pander to the lust of the eyes and the pride of 
life, but only an elusive spiritual presence that steals behind 
our most earnest purpose with the well-bred persuasive 
whisper that we might as well adapt ourselves and make 
the best of life: 

The world is very odd we see, 

We do not comprehend it; 
But in one fact we all agree, 

God won't and we can't mend it. 

Being common sense, it can't be sin 

To take it as I find it; 
The pleasure, to take pleasure in; 

The pain, try not to mind it. 

Nowhere in modern poetry, so far as I can recall, is there 
a more true and subtle depiction of that temper of world- 
liness which claims a monopoly of good sense, meets all 



374 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

deep questioning with patronizing dissuasives, and con- 
fronts all ideals with an incredulous lift of the eyebrow. 
He seems not altogether evil, this Spirit of worldliness; he 
would only take things as they are and, as the eighteenth 
century preachers used to say, make the best of both 
worlds, — if there should chance to be a second. Nor is he 
without his own views on religious matters, though he keeps 
them mostly to himself. Lord Bolingbroke, when asked 
"What is your religion?" is said to have replied, "The re- 
ligion of all gentlemen." "But what is that?" "That, sir, 
is what no gentleman ever tells." This Spirit is in like case. 
A decent conformity he is ready to approve, — 

You'll go to church of course, you know; 

• ••••••• 

Trust me, I make a point of that; 
No infidelity, that's flat! 

But to moon about religion, to stand agape over some deep 
truth only half apprehended until you lose your grip upon 
fact, and lose the taste of life, this to the Spirit of this 
world is the crowning folly. Dipsychus longs for some 
clear knowledge by which one might, as in the olden days, 
walk with God; he longs for some clear end of action that 
may draw him beyond the fringes of the fight into the pell- 
mell of men, and give full course to all his powers. In some 
happier moments he does have transient glimpses of help 
that Cometh from above; but with every better impulse 
slides in the fatal whisper of the Spirit to remind him of 
the limitations of life and counsel submission to the present 
and the positive: 

Submit, submit! 

*Tis common sense, and human wit 

Can claim no higher name than it. 

And thus Dipsychus oscillates between honest revolt and 
tame conformity, until, at last, the poem does not end, but 
merely stops; as if the poet felt that to such doubts there 
could be no final answer, from such solicitations no lasting 
relief. 



ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 375 

The other of these two longer poems, the Amours de 
Voyage, is a study of skeptic inefficiency. The character of 
the hero is indicated in the motto Clough prefixed to the 
poem, // doutait de tout, meme de I'amour. He is a 
young Englishman who, for no reason in particular, finds 
himself in Rome, for the first time, during the year of its 
siege by the French. 

Rome disappoints me much ; I hardly as yet understand, but 
Rubbishy seems the word that most exactly would suit it. 

He is not quite certain whether he is interested or bored; 
but the place, at all events, holds him by a kind of indolent 
fascination. In a few weeks comes the siege, and he is 
tempted to join the patriotic defenders against the French 
invaders. 

Offer one's blood an oblation to Freedom, and die for the Cause. 

But he cannot trust the impulse far enough to obey it. He 
is not sure that he is called on, 

Or would be justified even in taking away from the world that 
Precious creature, himself. Nature sent him here to abide here; 
. . . Nature wants him still, it is likely. 

Meantime he meets an English girl, who is in Rome with 
friends during the siege, and falls into what would seem 
very much like love. For himself, however, he cannot quite 
be sure about that, either, or decide whether it is a case of 
love or only a case of juxtaposition : 

I am in love, meantime, you think ; no doubt you would think so, 

I am in love, you say ; with those letters, of course, you would say so. 

I am in love, you declare. I think not so ; yet I grant you 

It is a pleasure indeed to converse with this girl. Oh, rare gift, 

Rare felicity, this! she can talk in a rational w^ay, can 

Speak upon subjects that really are matters of mind and of thinking, 

No, though she talk, it is music; her fingers desert not the keys; 'tis 
Song, though you hear in the song the articulate vocables sounded, 
Syllabled singly and sweetly the words of melodious meaning. 
I am in love, you say: I do not think so, exactly. 



376 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

He dallies and hesitates, fearing to take an irretraceable 
step merely at the dictates of accident or convention; and 
he vexes himself endlessly by reflection : 

Hang this thinking at last! what good is it? Oh, and what evil! 
Oh, what mischief and pain! like a clock in a sick man's chamber. 
Ticking, and ticking, and still through each covert of slumber 
pursuing. 

If he had been left to himself long enough, however, he 
would probably have drifted into a proposal at last. It is 
the natural result of inertia in such cases. But a meddling 
relative of the lady ventures a word with him about his 
intentions and his duty, and that determines him — in the 
wrong way. It would surely be intolerable to be pushed 
reluctantly to the altar by a man who wants to be your 
brother-in-law. He flings out of Rome In a huff, and Miss 
Trevellyn goes to Florence. On reflection, however, it 
occurs to him that the lady may have known nothing of the 
ill-advised intervention of her friend; and as, moreover, his 
interest persists strangely after the lady has gone, he conjec- 
tures that there may have been something more than juxta- 
position in it after all, and decides to follow her and find 
out. But a series of perverse accidents sets him off the 
track; he arrives in every place just a little after she has 
left it; and, at last, losing all clue to her whereabouts, he 
gives up the search with a kind of fatigue of will, and drops 
back to accept the inevitable : 

The Fates, it Is clear, are against us ; 
. Indeed, should we meet, I could not be certain ; 
All might be changed, you know ...... 

Great is Fate, and is best. I believe in Providence partly. 
What is ordained is right, and all that happens is ordered. 
Ah, no, that isn't it. But yet I retain my conclusion. 

It might be naturally supposed that there could be little 
interest in a poem concerned with the hesitancies of such a 
shilly-shallying young person as this. But there is a great 
deal of interest. For the persons in it, Mr. Claude, Miss 
Mary, and the sister, Georgina, are very real people. 



ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 377 

Clough had the art to make you acquainted with ordinary 
folk; and it is never seen to better advantage than in the 
really vivid way he puts before us this lover who cannot 
pronounce on his own symptoms. Nor must it be thought 
that Mr. Claude is merely a pretty sentimentalist, trying to 
make up what he calls his mind. On the contrary, he has 
Clough's own keen penetration, ripe culture, large and ob- 
servant sympathies. His talk abounds in most incisive 
comment upon men and things — art, politics, history, re- 
ligion. Indeed, his indecision is due in part to this very 
breadth of view. There is some truth in the remark of the 
humorist, that one must have a great deal of mind when it 
takes so long to make it up. The poem is saturated, also, 
with Clough's peculiar humor. Clough was one of those 
men of whom you say that he might have done almost any- 
thing; I have often thought that there were the possibilities 
of an excellent satirist in him. Satire has made but a rather 
poor showing in English verse since the eighteenth century 
men overdid it; but such a poem as the Amours de Voyage 
gives a hint of what place there might be for it to-day. 
The first charm of the poem, however, and its real 
purpose, is the remarkable depiction of the hesitancy and 
ineptitude born of doubt. I have said that the Dipsychus 
might be called an everyday Faust; with even greater fit- 
ness might the Amours de Voyage be called an everyday 
Hamlet. Take out of Hamlet's story its large circumstance 
and its sanguinary catastrophe, and you change it from 
tragedy to satire; but you leave Hamlet unchanged. His 
fatal weakness may be shown as well in the drawing room as 
on the buskined stage. As Mr. Claude says, 

Ah, the key of our life that passes all wards, opens all locks, 
Is not, / will J but / must. I must, — I must, — and I do it! 

The career of Clough was uneventful. After leaving 
Oxford he held, for a time, a position in the London Uni- 
versity, where no religious tests were required, and then, in 
1852, on the urgent invitation of Emerson, came over to 
America. He liked the atmosphere of intellectual freedom 



378 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

he found in Cambridge and he won the intimate friendship 
of the group of scholars and poets there, — Emerson, Long- 
fellow, Lowell, Holmes, Hawthorne, Norton, Sumner, 
Agassiz. Lowell in his memorial poem, Agassiz, has left a 
loving portrait of the 

Boy face, but grave with answerless desires, 

Poet in all that poets have of best, 

But foiled with riddles dark and cloudy aims. 

But he evidently missed somewhat the riper culture of the 
old world, and when, after eight months in Cambridge, 
he received the offer of a place in the Education Office, he 
accepted it and returned to England. This position he held 
until the close of his life. But his career was cut short by 
disease; he died, at the age of forty-two, in Florence, and 
his grave is in the little Protestant cemetery there, not far 
from that of Mrs. Browning. His life, one thinks, did not 
allow him space to show all the possibilities of his genius; 
and to the end he never gained that steadiness and certainty 
he craved. All his most characteristic poetry, as we have 
seen, either expresses directly his own personal struggle 
with doubt or depicts the benumbing effect of such doubt 
upon practical activity. But it is not a paradox to say that 
this poetry is healthful, often inspiring. For the motive 
underlying it all is Clough's unconquerable love and un- 
wearied search for truth. In this respect his work is in 
striking contrast with that of his friend, Matthew Arnold. 
The two men were, indeed, in some essential characteristics 
each the complement of the other. Clough had a hesitating, 
deliberate intellect, underlaid by a volume of buoyant feel- 
ing; Arnold had a clear, decisive intellect, on a basis of 
rather languid feeling. Arnold never shared Clough's irre- 
pressible force of spirit, Clough's incessant thirst for action, 
Clough's genial interest in men and women. Arnold had 
passed through much the same period of doubt and ques- 
tion as Clough, and his poetry is the record of it; but he 
had reached a very different outcome. To Arnold the tem- 
per of question and struggle, even after the truth, was 



ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 379 

intolerable. He craved calm and lucidity of mind. His 
typical poetic mood is always one of serenity; mournful it 
may be, but unperturbed and self-contained. He cannot en- 
dure the doubts that harass and corrode ; he faces his ques- 
tions; he states them with poignant sincerity; he admits that 
he has no answer for them; but he will not abandon himself 
to them. Rather, with a sad Olympian serenity, he turns 
away from them all to the tranquil certainties of beauty and 
culture. He stilled his own questioning by turning all the 
supernatural elements of religion into metaphor, and made 
for himself what he thought was a kind of defecated Chris- 
tianity; a kind, however, which could hardly have satisfied 
or convinced any rational human being. But Clough would 
never thus put aside his questions, or sink back into the 
temper of acquiescence. He was loyal to the demands of 
his own better nature; obedient to his own deepest sense of 
spiritual need. Though the truth seemed beyond his ken, he 
would never abandon the quest; least of all would he refuse 
to believe there is truth. Few nobler lines were ever written 
than the couplet from one of his lyrics, 

It fortifies my soul to know 

That, though I perish, Truth is so. 

It is this undaunted belief in high things yet unproved that 
makes his verse, in spite of its doubt, healthy and inspiring. 
Surely it is nobler thus to wrestle till the morning, though 
folded in mystery and goaded by pain, than to give up the 
struggle in placid indifference. Such a striving soul can 
never really know defeat, but finds still in its darkest mid- 
night some assurance of victory and light. Clough's last 
poem,^ written on his deathbed, breathes the spirit of his 
whole life and has poured new courage into thousands of 
fainting hearts : 

Say not the struggle nought availeth, 
The labour and the wounds are vain, 

The enemy faints not, nor faileth, 
And as things have been they remain. 

'Dated 1849; see Prose Remains, London, 1888, p. 55, or his wife's 
Memoir, Poems and Prose Remains, London, 1869, I, p. 53. [L. B. G.] 



38o AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; 

It may be, in yon smoke concealed, 
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers, 

And, but for you, possess the field. 

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking. 
Seem here no painful inch to gain. 

Far back, through creeks and inlets making, 
Comes silent, flooding in, the main. 

And not by eastern windows only. 

When daylight comes, comes in the light, 

In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly! 
But westward, look, the land is bright. 



A NEW ENGLAND MYSTIC 

IN this age of tumult, when so many old ideals are shat- 
tered and so many new ones proved false or futile, it 
is probable that there may be but little interest in the 
work of an obscure New England thinker of the nineteenth 
century. Yet the impartial critic will sometimes look back- 
ward with a certain regret to that older day, between 1830 
and 1880, and admit that he finds then more original think- 
ing and more good writing than in any other similar period 
in our literary history. Among the group of thinkers who 
made those years memorable a distinctive position must be 
accorded to Bronson Alcott; he was preeminently our New 
England mystic. 

Mysticism is foreign to our practical American temper. 
We demand that our knowledge shall be clear and definite. 
Some profound and familiar truths, indeed, we accept on 
their own evidence, confessing that they are not susceptible 
of clear statement before the understanding. We know 
that we only disguise our own ignorance in such words as 
"force," "being," "spirit." But we are content to use them 
without clear definition and are impatient of any attempt 
to fathom their meaning by any process of introspection. 
The mystic, on the contrary, cannot rest satisfied with the 
admission that such transcendental truths are beyond the 
grasp of our intellect; to him they seem precisely the kind 
of truths best worth knowing. He is constantly striving 
after some higher mode of knowledge, some spiritual ap- 
prehension, something which he may experience though he 
cannot express. He often finds his highest satisfaction in 
a mental state that transcends pure intellectual apprehen- 
sion, and delights, like old Sir Thomas Browne, to lose him- 
self in mystery and pursue his reason to an O Altitudo! 

381 



382 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

This was certainly true of Alcott. He was obsessed by one 
or two great truths and spent his life trying to utter them. 
He talked like an oracle, talked endlessly, and his listeners 
felt for the hour as if in the power of some strange inspira- 
tion. And the better the listener, the more potent this in- 
fluence upon him. Yet he never was able to reduce this 
high Delphic talk to plain statement in print. "Alcott has," 
said Emerson, "the greatest passion both of mind and tem- 
per in his discourse; but when the conversation is ended, all 
is over." Other thinkers, like Coleridge, have influenced 
their contemporaries, as Alcott did, mostly by personal 
interviews and conversation; but Coleridge, though he never 
elaborated any philosophical system, did leave a body of 
writings from which set consistent opinions, philosophical, 
religious, and critical, may readily be educed. When you 
look to-day for Alcott's works, however, you find only three 
or four thin volumes, like the Tablets and Table Talk, made 
up of gnomic sentences and paragraphs without much system 
or connection. It is perhaps less surprising that he should 
have found difiiculty in the attempt to apply his ideas in 
practice; yet it was the dream of some of his best years to 
do just that. It is the purpose of this paper to give a brief 
account of his two principal attempts, with some indication 
of the philosophic principles that prompted them and the 
results he hoped to attain by them. 

Although he was to be the most transcendental of New 
English transcendentallsts, Alcott was not one of the New 
England Brahmin type. His birthplace was the rural Con- 
necticut town of Wolcott; his father was a small farmer; 
his mental training, for several years after graduating from 
the cross-roads country schoolhouse, was mostly gained 
while working in Mr. Hoadley's clock factory or peddling 
tinware In Virginia. But he managed to read a good deal 
and to think more, and he early began to show his remark- 
able power of conversation. Several hospitable Virginia 
gentlemen found him no ordinary peddler, and welcomed 
him to homes of culture where he found good books and 
good talk. During the last of five annual visits to the 



A NEW ENGLAND MYSTIC 383 

South he passed some months among people of a yet dif- 
ferent type, the Quakers of North Carolina. Here he read, 
during a long illness, the writings of Penn and George Fox, 
Barclay's Apology, Law's Serious Call, all of which 
strengthened and fixed the mystical tendency in his thinking. 
It was two years later that he found his career. He 
taught for a little time in the public schools of Bristol and 
Wolcott, and in the fall of 1825 he opened in the adjoining 
town of Cheshire a school of his own. The most character- 
istic work of his life had begun; he was really a teacher the 
rest of his days. At first this Cheshire School differed little 
from the ordinary Connecticut common school of the 
period, but Alcott's ideals of the purpose and methods of 
education were already taking shape, and he at once began 
to embody them in his school. Two great principles de- 
cided all his teaching: first, that the moral culture of the 
pupil ought always to accompany his intellectual training; 
second, that all education should mean the bringing out 
of the native capacity of the child, or, to use Alcott's own 
phrase, "the production and exercise of original thought." 
The child is educated not by what is imparted from without 
to his merely receptive mind, rather by what he learns for 
himself and from himself. In accordance with these prin- 
ciples the teaching in the Cheshire School took the form of 
suggestive and interesting conversation; the curiosity of the 
pupil was constantly stimulated; he was taught to define for 
himself the meaning of all words he used or found in his 
reading, and to find out facts and truths — especially truths — 
for himself. A small well-chosen library was placed at his 
disposal. Some of the books were beyond the full apprecia- 
tion of children, but it was a part of Alcott's plan always to 
make the child's mind look up. In the government of the 
school special effort was made to develop the child's sense 
of personal responsibility and the power of moral judg- 
ment. Two superintendents were appointed, at intervals, 
from the pupils themselves, whose duty it was to oversee 
the schoolroom, record all misdemeanors, and sometimes to 
take charge of the room in the absence of the teacher. 



384 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

The Cheshire School soon attracted the favorable atten- 
tion of educators not only in Connecticut but in adjoining 
states. The Boston Recorder, at that time the most influ- 
ential paper in Boston, in the summer of 1827 quoted a Con- 
necticut writer as saying that Mr. Alcott's school in Cheshire 
was "the best common school in this State, perhaps in the 
United States." A Society for the Improvement of Common 
Schools at its annual meeting, in Hartford, in 1827, elected 
Alcott to membership, and appointed a committee to ex- 
amine the principles and methods of the new school. But 
Avhile there were flattering notices from educational experts 
there was growing dissatisfaction at home. It is not easy 
to introduce new ideas into an old community. Plain 
Cheshire folk probably looked with some suspicion upon 
such a departure from their traditional conception of what 
a schoolmaster ought to do and thought the new sort of 
education their children were getting a doubtful substitute 
for practical drill in the three R's, enforced upon stupidity 
or laziness by the occasional use of the birch. Whatever 
the causes, confidence in the school declined. The number 
of pupils fell from eighty to thirty, and after about two 
years of trial, Alcott gave it up. 

But he had by no means abandoned his educational 
ideals. His story for the next half dozen years is the record 
of various not very successful attempts to put them into 
practice, and in 1834 he opened the famous Temple School, 
which must always be associated with his name. Several 
years earlier he had made his first extended stay in Boston 
and gained the friendship of Emerson and Channing. One 
day in the summer of 1828 he writes in his journal, with 
fine enthusiasm, after listening to a sermon by Channing: 
"There is a city in our world upon which the light of the sun 
of righteousness has risen — a sun which beams in its full 
meridian splendor there. ... It is the city that is set on 
high; it cannot be hid. It is Boston, whose morality is of a 
purer and more elevated kind than that of any city in 
America. Channing is its moral teacher." It was to 
Boston, then, that Alcott, after two rather discouraging 



A NEW ENGLAND MYSTIC 385 

attempts in Philadelphia, resolved to return for his last 
great experiment as a schoolmaster. His plan had the sup- 
port of a number of eminent friends, Channing, Emerson, 
Mrs. Elizabeth Hoar, Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, Miss 
Bliss, — afterward Mrs. George Bancroft, — and the Pea- 
body sisters, — one of whom afterward married Nathaniel 
Hawthorne, and another, Horace Mann. The third sister, 
Miss Elizabeth, was Alcott's personal assistant in the 
school. He secured a commodious room in the Masonic 
Temple, and opened the famous Temple School in Septem- 
ber, 1834, with thirty pupils from three to twelve years 
of age. 

That time was the beginning of a new era in New Eng- 
land thought. The most prominent figure in Boston just 
then, as Alcott saw, was William Ellery Channing. Though 
a Unitarian in theology, Channing was a transcendentalist 
in philosophy, — our first transcendentalist, as a recent writer 
has called him; "our bishop" was Emerson's phrase. Two 
years before, in 1832, Emerson had definitely left the Uni- 
tarian pulpit, and two years later, 1836, he published A^^- 
ture, the first great epoch-making deliverance of the new 
spiritual philosophy. In the same year was held the first 
meeting of the little group of thinkers, Emerson, Hedge, 
Freeman Clarke, Ripley, and Alcott, who, with wide differ- 
ences of individual opinion, were so far agreed upon the 
supreme importance of the truths that transcend mere intel- 
lectual apprehension that they could not repudiate the name 
applied to them. The Transcendental Club. Within two or 
three years more some dozen others were more or less 
closely associated with them, — Theodore Parker, Orestes 
Bronson, Jones Very, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and in 
1840 the movement had an organ. The Dial, edited by Rip- 
ley and Margaret Fuller. Alcott was at once recognized as 
in some respects the most prominent figure of the group. 
It is probably true, indeed, that he gave inspiration to the 
movement rather than any clear guidance or teaching. He 
had not read very deeply in the new German philosophy of 
Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte, which at that time was just be- 



386 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

ginning to filter into New England thought largely through 
the influence of Coleridge; his teachers were rather the 
Greeks, — Plato, Pythagoras, and especially Plotinus, whom 
he read in Taylor's translation. For English philosophy he 
never cared much, save for the work of some of the Cam- 
bridge Neo-Platonists, like Henry More, — whom he greatly 
resembled, — and for Coleridge. It was not until later that 
he became interested in the German mystics, like Jacob 
Boehme. But, first and last, his reading seemed to intensify 
the few convictions he held to be primary and fundamental, 
rather than to broaden and systematize his thinking. 
Margaret Fuller said of him once, — "Alcott has only a few 
thoughts; I could count them all." And a hostile critic in 
a Boston paper pronounced his series of Orphic sayings in 
The Dial to be mere repetitions, "a train of cars with only 
one passenger," All his thinking centered about the two 
questions, "What am I?" and "Whence am I?" and he did 
not always see the difficulties and doubts that beset those 
questions. To the first he had a clear and positive answer: 
I am Spirit, a person that thinks and loves, and wills, en- 
tirely distinct from, and separable from, this "machine 
which is to me," as Hamlet says. So much we know ; though, 
so far as I can see, he did not go quite so far as Berke- 
ley in denying substantial reality to body. To the ques- 
tion, "Whence?" his answer was equally positive, but not 
equally clear. He could not conceive of the human spirit 
as really beginning at birth any more than as perishing at 
death. Some form of preexistence is implied in the very 
idea of spirit. Yet he would not dogmatize on the subject, or 
commit himself either to any Oriental schemes of transmigra- 
tion or to the fantastic assertions of the mystics. He only 
held that what we know as our spirit must in some sense 
come from the Universal and Absolute Spirit we call God. 
Such a change and union with a material body would seem 
in some sense to be a descent; he often called it, borrowing 
the term from Plotinus, "genesis by lapse." This notion 
of the origin of personality was at the foundation of Alcott's 
theory of education. If our spirit came from the absolute 



A NEW ENGLAND MYSTIC 387 

and perfect Spirit, it would seem that it must have, at least 
in some potential form, traces of the perfection of its orig- 
inal. "To conceive," said Alcott, "a child's acquirements 
as originating in nature, dating from his birth into his body, 
seems an atheism that only a shallow material theology 
would entertain." He held that the familiar passage in 
Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality is not 
only noble poetry but the truest philosophy. It was with 
this conviction that he opened the Temple School. 

Here, even more than in the earlier Cheshire School, it 
was Alcott's effort to bring out the native content of the 
child mind. The attention of the pupils was fixed not so 
much upon things as upon thoughts. In the two afternoon 
hours the older scholars were given a little elementary Latin 
and practical arithmetic, but all the forenoon hours were 
occupied with "conversations" intended to educe the orig- 
inal, untutored ideas of the children. Sometimes Alcott 
would give out lists of simple words to be spelled, or would 
spell them himself to make sure the children recognized 
the words, and would then require the children to define 
them, not giving any formal dictionary meaning, but stating 
as well as they could what the words stood for in their own 
thought. Different statements of meaning were compared; 
sometimes, when the pupil merely repeated some other 
word, he could be shown that he had at the moment no 
definite thought in his mind. The words were sometimes 
names of sensible qualities often used figuratively of moral 
qualities or actions, as "black," for example; then the ques- 
tioning would bring out the native sense of moral analogy 
in the pupil, at the same time directly cultivating his imagi- 
nation. The words were always short and familiar: but 
usually the most familiar words are the most profound, — 
names for what everybody knows and nobody can tell. 
It was precisely Alcott's theory that such primal conceptions 
as "mind," "spirit," "know," "feel," "good," "bad," all lie 
potentially clear in the child mind, and that he should be 
taught to recognize them, name them, and perceive their 
relations to conduct. The hours of every Wednesday fore- 



388 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

noon were given to "Conversations on Spirit as Displayed 
in the Life of Christ." He chose the life of Jesus, partly 
because his life and sayings are familiar and accessible to 
every one, and partly because he claimed — as Channing 
did — that, whatever your theological views of Jesus, you 
will admit that He retained through all his life on earth 
and exhibited in all his actions those primal spiritual truths 
coming from God that are — as He said — revealed unto 
babes, but are too often beclouded by what is deemed the 
wisdom and prudence of maturer years. In 1835 Miss 
Elizabeth Peabody, Alcott's assistant, published with his 
consent a full account of the school, explaining its purpose 
and methods, and giving as near as possible a verbatim 
report of some of its most interesting exercises. This book, 
now seldom seen, is a classic in the history of education. 
Doubtless many readers of Miss Peabody's book will say 
of Alcott's teaching that he was trying to make children 
think upon themes inaccessible to the thought of child- 
hood, — the nature of spirit, the conception of God, the 
ultimate ground of duty, the rank of our emotions; in a 
word, that he was trying to make mystics of lads and lasses 
not yet in their teens. In reply to such criticism Alcott al- 
ways reaffirmed his central principle of the primitive per- 
ceptions of childhood. As Emerson put it, he was trying 
to send children back upon themselves for the answer to 
every question of a moral character; to show them some- 
thing holy in their own consciousness. To some of his 
critics he might also have retorted that his procedure was 
wiser than that of the Christian people who merely teach 
young people in their catechism, and thus secure an idle 
assent to statements corresponding to nothing in the child's 
mind, — the surest way to produce indifference or hypocrisy. 
It cannot be denied, however, that in some of his attempts 
to secure from young children the analysis of their thought 
or feeling he imposed too far upon the natural and healthy 
reserve of the child mind; especially when his questioning 
touched the emotions or affections. It is certain that such 
a school could not be a model for general imitation; for not 



A NEW ENGLAND MYSTIC 389 

one man in ten thousand would be competent to con- 
duct it. 

In fact the Temple School soon had to meet adverse 
criticism. Many parents began to think their children 
should be learning a little more Latin rather than puzzling 
their brains over juvenile psychology. Even some of his 
friends thought Mr. Alcott too visionary for a practical 
schoolmaster. The first pronounced and public attack grew 
out of his Wednesday morning conversations, which, for 
some time, he had been continuing on Sunday forenoons. 
In 1836 and 1837 he published some of them, in two 
volumes, as reported by Miss Peabody, under the title. 
Conversations with Children on the Gospels. The critics 
who previously had known little or nothing about Mr. 
Alcott's work woke up to find that he had been teach- 
ing in his school some very dangerous philosophy and 
religion. The orthodox people who believed in the 
sturdy doctrine of the condition of every man wherein by 
nature he is inclined to only evil, "and that continually," 
found a very dangerous heresy in Alcott's first principles 
of education; and many who could hardly be accounted 
orthodox felt that the life and teaching of Jesus had been 
rather too freely used to support the freakish psychology 
of Mr. Bronson Alcott. The public press joined in the out- 
cry, one paper quoting the verdict of a Harvard professor 
that "one third of Mr. Alcott's book was absurd, one third 
was blasphemous, and one third was obscene." "Such" 
remarked the editor, "will be the deliberate opinion of 
those who diligently read and soberly reflect." The same 
paper, on another date, suggested that this teacher should 
be brought before the "honorable judge of our municipal 
court." Alcott himself probably never had any intention of 
supporting or denying any particular doctrine of the person 
of Jesus; he was only drawing from his life such lessons as 
members of any denomination must find in his humanity. 
But the controversy ruined the school. He had opened in 
1834 with thirty pupils and the number had risen at one 
time to forty, but before the end of 1837 it had fallen 



390 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

to ten. The end came next year in a characteristic way. 
He had admitted to his school a colored girl. This was 
too much for the respectable citizens of Boston, who, a 
few years before, had dragged Garrison through their 
streets with a halter around his neck. They protested; 
and as Alcott angrily refused to alter his ways, they took 
their children out; it was insufferable that the spirit of 
Jesus should be illustrated in the psychology of a negress 1 
Mr. Alcott found his school reduced to his own three daugh- 
ters, one other white child, and the colored girl, and he shut 
up the doors. It was in June, 1839. 

The whole story is an interesting chapter in the history 
of education. While no one nowadays would approve Mr. 
Alcott's extreme introspective methods, there can be no 
question that his school had considerable influence upon the 
development of common school education in Massachusetts. 
It is significant that Miss Peabody's sister, Miss Mary 
Peabody, afterward Mrs. Horace Mann, was so prominent 
in the discussions on common school education for the next 
twenty years. Mr. W. T. Harris, the warm admirer of 
Alcott and the best expositor of Alcott's philosophy, was 
superintendent of schools in St. Louis, president of the 
National Educational Association, and for many years 
chairman of the Boston Schoolmasters' Club. 

In the next half dozen years there is little of external 
incident to record in the life of Alcott. After the failure 
of his school he removed to Concord to be near his friends, 
Emerson, Thoreau, and the Ripley and Hoar families. 
He rented a house with an acre of ground and pleased him- 
self with thinking that he might now support his family 
in simple independence upon his own acre; but farming 
proved less interesting than philosophy, and no more lucra- 
tive. He was impatient of inactivity and seemed passing 
into a pronounced individualism, doubting the value of 
almost every established institution. In 1842 he refused 
to pay his town tax on the ground that he could not sup- 
port a government not based upon the law of love. Emer- 
son tried to persuade him to put his philosophic notions into 



A NEW ENGLAND MYSTIC 391 

print, but he would not write. It was not until the spring 
of 1843 that he found opportunity to make another famous 
experiment, this time by founding not a school but a com- 
munity. 

The story of the Temple School had got over to Eng- 
land and excited so much interest among a small group of 
educators there that they entered into correspondence with 
Mr. Alcott and named for him a school they were estab- 
lishing near London, Alcott House. From them came an 
urgent invitation that the Boston philosopher should visit 
England to give them the benefit of his experience. Emer- 
son and a few friends quietly furnished the means for his 
passage, and in May, 1842, Alcott sailed for England, 
"with ten sovereigns in his red pocketbook," says Mr. San- 
born, "and a bill of twenty pounds on Baring Brothers." 
He was in England through the summer, holding high con- 
verse with his new friends on all topics ; and his enthusiasm 
was so contagious and convincing that when he came back 
to Concord in October he brought with him three of them, — 
a Mr. Charles Lane and his son and a Mr. Wright, — with 
a scheme for what they called a New Eden, to be planted 
in a region more hospitable than England. They talked 
endlessly through the winter. In the spring Mr. Lane, who 
fortunately had one thousand pounds to venture in the 
enterprise, bought a little farmhouse with some acres of 
picturesque but not very fertile land, and in June the colo- 
nists riioved in. Besides Alcott and his three friends there 
were Mrs. Alcott and her four girls, and within two or 
three weeks eight other members had joined the little com- 
munity. There were never at any one time more than a 
dozen members besides the Alcott family. The farm was 
located in the town of Harvard, about thirty miles from 
Boston; they gave it the attractive name of Fruitlands. 

It is difficult for one carrying a fair amount of common 
sense to appreciate the purposes and hopes of the Fruit- 
lands enthusiasts. The best account of the plan is given by 
Louisa Alcott in her half-humorous story. Transcendental 
fVild Oats. They did not plan a large community; their 



392 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

ideal was rather that of a large family. Unlike the more 
famous Brook Farm association, organized two years be- 
fore, Fruitlands was not to be a socialistic experiment, with 
certain romantic and idyllic attractions; it was rather almost 
monastic in plan and methods. Alcott and Lane hoped, by 
abandoning the selfish motives which govern an artificial 
society, by the discipline of manual labor combined with 
moral studies, by the exclusion of everything that might 
suggest bodily indulgence, to attain soundness of judgment 
and clear spiritual vision. They refused animal food, not 
only because they held we have no right to destroy life, 
but also because it is repulsive and degrading to eat a dead 
animal. Even milk and eggs were forbidden, — the milk 
belonged to the calf, the eggs contained the promise and 
potency of future life. Their food was to be fruits, grains, 
and vegetables, and of the latter they preferred those that 
grow upward into the air, not downward into the ground. 
The ground itself was to be fertilized, not with manure, 
which, said Mr. Alcott, is filthy in idea and practice, a base, 
corrupting, and unjust mode of forcing nature, but by turn- 
ing under growing crops, — a method obviously impracti- 
cable the first year. The reformers objected to employing 
enforced labor, either of man or beast, and at first proposed 
to prepare the land for planting solely with the spade; but 
as that was found to be too laborious, as well as too slow 
for the season that had well begun, a farmer from a neigh- 
boring town, who was a kind of half-way convert, was asked 
to come over with his oxen — really, one ox yoked with a cow 
— and plow the land for sowing. Ample provision was made 
for intellectual culture. Mr. Alcott had brought over from 
England a pretty large library of mystic philosophy and 
theology, and certain hours every day were to be given to 
reading and meditation, accompanied by discussion and con- 
versations in which Alcott was, of course, the leader. There 
are certain indications, indeed, that Lane, who was in- 
clined to be despotic, occasionally intimated that more man- 
ual and less spiritual assistance would be welcome. 

The family was to be open to all who evinced spiritual 



A NEW ENGLAND MYSTIC 393 

sympathy with its purposes, but there were no additions 
after the first month. Some of the brotherhood were very 
odd characters. One of them had once been in a mad- 
house and was pronounced by Lane "still not a spiritual 
being, at least not consciously and wishfully so." Another, 
one Samuel Brown, convinced that most of the ills of life 
are due to the enervating effects of clothing, troubled the 
family and scandalized the neighborhood by casting off the 
linen tunic which was the family uniform, and walking over 
the hillsides at night in almost Adamic simplicity. As the 
season advanced. Lane and Alcott, troubled to find that 
some of the family were leaving and no new ones were tak- 
ing their places, made a trip to New York in search of re- 
cruits, but they got none. "The number of really living per- 
sons among the three hundred thousand inhabitants of New 
York," said Lane, "is very small." So long as summer 
lasted, and there seemed a prospect of securing sustenance 
from the kindly fruits of the earth, life at Fruitlands went 
on in a high and hopeful calm. Alcott especially, as his 
daughter says, "simply revelled in the Newness, fully be- 
lieving that his dream was to be beautifully realized, and 
in time not only little Fruitlands, but the whole earth 
be turned into a Happy Valley." Perhaps the only 
skeptic of the group was Mrs. Alcott, the real martyr of 
Fruitlands. But as cold weather came on, the sky changed. 
The crops, carelessly planted and ignorantly tended, seemed 
likely to fail altogether. The community had no money and 
no credit. One after another the members left, until, by 
New Year's, only Lane and his son were left. Lane him- 
self now began to blame Mrs. Alcott for lack of confidence 
in higher things, and blamed Alcott for weakly listening to 
his wife. That blame was unjust, for Alcott never con- 
sented to give up his scheme. Finally, when even Lane and 
his son had deserted to a Shaker community in an adjoining 
town, Alcott in despair shut himself up in his room and 
faced the end. For days he would neither eat nor drink, 
while his faithful wife watched by his side. At last, one 
night, too feeble to rise, he consented to take food, and 



394 AN OLD CASTLE AND OTHER ESSAYS 

next morning, in the chill of a January day, the reformer 
and his family rode on an ox-sled to a hospitable house 
nearby where they remained until they could get back to 
Concord. Lane, anxious to recover at least part of the 
money he had put into Fruitlands, sold the farm and re- 
turned to England. The New Eden had lasted only about 
seven months. 

The remainder of Alcott's career was without striking 
incident, though it was not half over. In Concord he came 
to know, as he had never known before, the charm of home 
and friends. Emerson, and Hawthorne, and Thoreau, and 
Ellery Channing were his near neighbors; Freeman Clarke, 
and George William Curtis and his brother Burrill, were 
frequent visitors. In such companionship he lived five years, 
reading, thinking, talking endlessly, but, except for a few 
articles in The Dial, writing nothing. He would seem to 
have had no clearly visible means of support; and, probably 
for that reason, in 1848 he went back to Boston, where 
Mrs. Alcott found employment in a benevolent society and 
the daughters began to teach. For two or three winters, 
following the example of Emerson, he gave public lectures, 
or, as he preferred to call them, "conversations," in a num- 
ber of Western cities, which were often well attended, and 
proved of considerable financial assistance. But in the 
summer of 1857 ^^e family were back again in Concord, 
where they belonged. The remaining twenty-five years of 
his life were passed in a high serenity among his old friends. 
He published two or three little books made up of scraps 
of his reflections, but the most fortunate work of his later 
years was the founding of the Concord Summer School of 
Philosophy, which gave a permanent opportunity for that 
platonic form of Instruction in which he always delighted. 
He died in 1888. 

It is not easy to-day to form any accurate estimate of 
Alcott's influence. If he had any consistent scheme of philo- 
sophical opinions he never put it into print. To most of 
his contemporaries he seemed a curious visionary, with no 
hold on practical life, obsessed by one or two ideas that he 



A NEW ENGLAND MYSTIC 395 

could not express and probably did not himself very clearly 
understand. His daughter Louisa evidently had him in 
mind when she said that her idea of a philosopher was a 
man up in a balloon with his family tugging at the ropes to 
keep him down. Even his admirers were forced to admit 
that his talk seemed sometimes sheer inspiration without 
definite intellectual content, and now and then voted him, — 
as Emerson, in a fit of impatience, once did, — "a tedious 
archangel." Yet we must remember that some of the best 
minds in New England spoke in what seemed extravagant 
terms of this man and of their obligation to him. And the 
few ideas which he was always trying to enforce are just 
those ideas that, in the material progress of the last seventy- 
five years, our American thought has most needed to re- 
member. He renders no small service to mankind who can 
assert with high and convincing confidence the one great 
central truth: that we are spirit. After all, whatever else 
they may have said or written, that is the one great teaching 
of the leaders in English philosophy and literature for the 
last century, — Coleridge, Carlyle, Emerson, Browning. 
Alcott, whatever his limitations, belonged to their class; 
rendered that service. 



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